■  llliiiHimmiMTMTTrr 


JHOME  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


Digitized  by  tine  Internet  Arcliive 

in  2008  witli  funding  from 

IVIicrosoft  Corporation 


littp://www.arcliive.org/details/drjolinsonliiscircOObail 


HOME  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
OF  MODERN  KNOWLEDGE 

No.  59 

Editors: 

HERBERT    FISHER,  M.A.,  F.B.A. 
Prof.  GILBERT  MURRAY,  Litt.D., 

LL.D.,  F.B.A. 
Prof.  J.   ARTHUR    THOMSON,  M.A. 
Prof.  WILLIAM  T.  BREWSTER,  M.A. 


THE  HOME  UI^IVEESITY  LIBKARYl 
OF  MODEKN  KNOWLEDGE 

i6mo  cloth,  50  cents  net,  by  mail  56  cents 
LITERATURE  AND  ART 

Already  Published 

SHAKESPEARE By  John  Masefield 

ENGLISH    LITERATURE- 
MODERN  By  G.  H.  Mair 

LANDMARKS     IN     FRENCH 
LITERATURE     . By  G.  L.  Steachey 

ARCHITECTURE By  W.  R.  Lethaby 

ENGLISH    LITERATURE- 
MEDIEVAL  By  W.  P.  Ker 

THE    ENGLISH    LANGUAGE  .    .  By  L.  Pearsall  Smith 

GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS  .  By  W.  P.  Trent  and  Johk 

Erskine 

Future  Issues 

THE  WRITING   OF  ENGLISH  .  By  W.  T.  Brewster 
ITALIAN  ART  OF  THE  RENAIS- 
SANCE    By  Roger  E.  Fry 

GREAT  WRITERS  OF  RUSSIA  .  By  C.  T.  Hagbert  Wright 
ANCIENT   ART   AND  RITUAL  .  By  Miss  Jane  Hareisoh 
THE  RENAISSANCE By  Mrs.  R.  A.  Taylor 


DR.  JOHNSON  AND 
HIS  CIRCLE 


BY 


JOHN    BAILEY 

AUTHOR  OF  "POETS  AND  POETRY,"    "THE  CLAIMS  OF 
FRENCH    POETRY,"   ETC. 


NEW   YORK 
HENRY   HOLT   AND    COMPANY 

LONDON 
WILLIAMS   AND   NORGATE 


B15 


CONTENTS 

CHAP.  PAGE 

I      JOHNSON   AS   A   NATIONAL    INSTITUTION  .  7 

II      THE   GENIUS   OF  BOSWELL     .  .  .  .37 

III      THE   LIVES   OP    BOSWELL   AND   JOHNSON  .         70 

IV    Johnson's  character  and  characteristics     109 
V    Johnson's  works      .        .        ,        .        .171 

VI      THE  FRIENDS   OF  JOHNSON  .  ,  .      230 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 253 

INDEX ;  .      255 


163594 


DK   JOHNSON  AND 
HIS  CIRCLE 

CHAPTER  I 

JOHNSON   AS   A   NATIONAL  INSTITUTION 

The  name  of  Samuel  Johnson  is,  of  course, 
not  the  greatest  in  Enghsh  prose,  but  even 
to-day,  when  he  has  been  dead  more  than  a 
century  and  a  quarter,  it  is  still  the  most 
familiar.  We  live  in  an  age  of  newspapers. 
Where  all  can  read,  the  newspaper  press,  taken 
as  a  whole,  will  be  a  fairly  accurate  reflection 
of  what  is  in  the  mind  of  a  people.  Nothing 
will  be  mentioned  frequently  in  newspapers 
which  is  not  of  some  interest  to  a  large  number 
of  readers ;  and  whatever  is  frequently  men- 
tioned there  cannot  fail  to  become  widely 
known.  Tried  by  this  test,  Johnson's  name 
must  be  admitted  to  be  very  widely  known 
and  of  almost  universal  interest.  No  man 
of  letters — perhaps  scarcely  even  Shakespeare 
himself — is  so  often  quoted  in  the  columns 
of  the  daily  press.  His  is  a  name  that  may 
7 


8    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

be  safely  introduced  into  any  written  or  spoken 
discussion,  without  fear  of  the  stare  of  unre- 
cognizing  ignorance ;  and  the  only  danger 
to  which  those  who  quote  him  expose  them- 
selves is  that  of  the  yawn  of  over-familiarity. 
Even  in  his  own  lifetime  his  reputation 
extended  far  beyond  the  limited  circle  of 
literature  or  scholarship.  Actresses  delighted 
in  his  conversation;  soldiers  were  proud  to 
entertain  him  in  their  barracks ;  innkeepers 
boasted  of  his  having  slept  in  their  inns.  His 
celebrity  was  such  that  he  himself  once  said 
there  was  hardly  a  day  in  which  the  news- 
papers did  not  mention  his  name ;  and  a  year 
after  his  death  Boswell  could  venture  to  write 
publicly  of  him  that  his  "  character,  religious, 
moral,  political  and  literary,  nay  his  figure 
and  manner,  are,  I  believe,  more  generally 
known  than  those  of  almost  any  man."  But 
what  was,  in  his  own  day,  partly  a  respect 
paid  to  the  maker  of  the  famous  Dictionary 
and  partly  a  curiosity  about  "  the  great 
Oddity,"  as  the  Edensor  innkeeper  called 
him,  has  in  the  course  of  the  nineteenth 
century  become  a  great  deal   more. 

He  is  still  for  us  the  great  scholar  and  the 
strongly  marked  individuality,  but  he  has 
gradually  attained  a  kind  of  apotheosis,  a  kind 
of  semi -legendary  position,  almost  rivalling 
that  of  the  great  John  Bull  himself,  as  the 


A  NATIONAL  INSTITUTION         9 

embodiment  of  the  essential  features  of  the 
Enghsh  character.  We  never  think  of  the 
typical  Englishman  being  like  Shakespeare 
or  Milton.  In  the  first  place,  we  know  very- 
little  about  Shakespeare,  and  not  very  much 
about  Milton;  and  so  we  are  thrown  back 
on  their  works,  and  our  mental  picture  of 
them  takes  on  a  dim  and  shadowy  grandeur, 
very  unlike  what  we  see  when  we  look  within 
into  our  familiar  and  commonplace  selves. 
Nor  do  Englishmen  often  plume  themselves 
on  their  aesthetic  or  imaginative  gifts.  The 
achievements  of  Wren,  or  Purcell,  or  Keats 
may  arouse  in  them  admiration  and  pride, 
but  never  a  sense  of  kinship.  When  they 
recognize  themselves  in  the  national  literature, 
it  is  not  Hamlet,  or  Lear,  or  Clarissa,  or  Ravens- 
wood  that  holds  up  the  mirror ;  but  Falstaff, 
or  The  Bastard,  or  Tom  Jones,  or  Jeanie  Deans, 
or  perhaps  Gabriel  Oak :  plain  people,  all 
of  them,  whatever  their  differences,  with  a 
certain  quiet  and  downright  quality  which 
Englishmen  are  apt  to  think  the  peculiar 
birthright  of  the  people  of  this  island.  It  is 
that  quality  which  was  the  central  thing  in 
the  mind  of  Johnson,  and  it  is  to  his  possession 
of  it,  and  to  our  unique  knowledge  of  it  through 
Boswell,  that  more  than  anything  else  he  owes 
this  position  of  the  typical  Englishman  among 
our  men  of  letters.    We  can  all  imagine  that 


10    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

under  other  conditions,  and  with  an  added 
store  of  brains  and  character,  we  might  each 
have  been  Doctor  Johnson.  Before  we  could 
fancy  ourselves  Shelley  or  Keats  the  self  that 
we  know  would  have  to  be  not  developed  but 
destroyed.  But  in  Johnson  we  see  our  own 
magnified  and  glorified  selves. 

It  has  sometimes  been  asserted  to  be  the 
function  of  the  man  of  letters  to  say  what 
others  can  feel  or  think  but  only  he  can  ex- 
press. Whatever  may  be  thought  of  such 
a  definition  of  literature,  it  is  certain  that 
Johnson  discharged  this  particular  function 
with  almost  unique  success.  And  he  continues 
to  do  so  still,  especially  in  certain  fields .  When- 
ever we  feel  strongly  the  point  of  view  of 
common  sense  we  almost  expect  to  be  able 
to  find  some  trenchant  phrase  of  Johnson's 
with  which  to  express  it.  If  it  cannot  be  found 
it  is  often  invented.  A  few  years  ago,  a  lover 
of  Johnson  walking  along  a  London  street 
passed  by  the  side  of  a  cabmen's  shelter.  Two 
cabmen  were  getting  their  dinner  ready,  and 
the  Johnsonian  was  amused  and  pleased  to 
hear  one  say  to  the  other  :  "After  all,  as 
Doctor  Johnson  says,  a  man  may  travel  all 
over  the  world  without  seeing  anything  better 
than  his  dinner."  The  saying  was  new  to 
him  and  probably  apocryphal,  though  the 
sentiment  is  one  which  can  well  be  imagined 


A  NATIONAL  INSTITUTION       11 

as  coming  from  the  great  man's  mouth.  But 
whether  apocryphal  or  authentic,  the  remark 
well  illustrates  both  the  extent  and  the  parti- 
cular nature  of  Johnson's  fame.  You  would 
not  find  a  cabman  ascribing  to  Milton  or  Pope 
a  shrewd  saying  that  he  had  heard  and  liked. 
Is  there  any  man  but  Johnson  in  all  our  liter- 
ary history  whom  he  would  be  likely  to  call 
in  on  such  an  occasion  ?  That  is  the  measure 
of  Johnson's  universality  of  appeal.  And 
the  secret  of  it  lies,  to  use  his  own  phrase,  not 
used  of  himself  of  course,  in  the  "  bottom  of 
sense,"  which  is  the  primary  quality  in  all  he 
wrote  and  said,  and  is  not  altogether  absent 
from  his  ingrained  prejudices,  or  even  from 
the  perversities  of  opinion  which  his  love  of 
argument  and  opposition  so  constantly  led 
him  to  adopt.  Whether  right  or  wrong  there 
is  always  something  broadly  and  fundament- 
ally human  about  him  which  appeals  to  all  and 
especially  to  the  plain  man.  Every  one  feels 
at  home  at  once  with  a  man  who  replies  to 
doubts  about  the  freedom  of  the  will  with  the 
plain  man's  answer  :  "  Sir,  we  know  our  will's 
free,  and  there's  an  end  on't,"  and  if  he  adds 
to  it  an  argument  which  the  plain  man  would 
not  have  thought  of,  it  is  still  one  which  the 
plain  man  and  everyone  else  can  understand. 
"  You  are  surer  that  you  can  lift  up  your  finger 
or  not  as  you  please,  than  you  are  of  any 


12    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

conclusion  from  a  deduction  of  reasoning." 
Moreover  we  all  think  we  are  more  honest  than 
our  neighbours  and  are  at  once  drawn  to  the 
man  who  was  less  of  a  humbug  than  any  man 
who  ever  lived.  "  Clear  your  mind  of  cant " 
is  perhaps  the  central  text  of  Johnson,  on  which 
he  enlarged  a  hundred  times.  "  When  a 
butcher  tells  you  his  heart  bleeds  for  his 
country,  he  has  in  fact  no  uneasy  feeling." 
No  one  who  has  ever  attended  an  election 
meeting  fails  to  welcome  that  saying,  or  the 
answer  to  Bos  well's  fears  that  if  he  were  in 
Parliament  he  would  be  unhappy  if  things 
went  wrong,  "  That's  cant,  sir.  .  .  .  Public 
affairs  vex  no  man."  "  Have  they  not  vexed 
yourself  a  little,  sir  ?  Have  you  not  been 
vexed  at  all  by  the  turbulence  of  this  reign 
and  by  that  absurd  vote  of  the  House  of 
Commons,  '  That  the  influence  of  the  Crown 
has  increased,  is  increasing,  and  ought  to 
be  diminished '  ?  "  "  Sir,  I  have  never  slept 
an  hour  less,  nor  eat  an  ounce  less  meat.  I 
would  have  knocked  the  factious  dogs  on 
the  head,  to  be  sure ;  but  I  was  not  vexed." 

Here  we  all  know  where  we  are.  This  is  what 
we  wish  we  could  have  said  ourselves,  and 
can  fancy  ourselves  saying  under  more  favour- 
able circumstances ;  and  we  like  the  man  who 
says  it  for  us.  Certainly  no  man,  not  even 
Swift,  ever  put  the  plain  man's  view  with 


A  NATIONAL  INSTITUTION       13 

such  exactness,  felicity,  and  force  as  John- 
son does  a  thousand  times  in  the  pages  of 
Boswell.  And  not  only  in  the  pages  of  Boswell. 
One  of  the  objects  of  this  introductory  chapter 
is  to  try  to  give  a  preliminary  answer  to  the 
very  natural  question  which  confronts  every 
one  who  thinks  about  Johnson,  how  it  has 
come  about  that  a  man  whose  works  are  so 
little  read  to-day  should  still  be  so  great  a 
name  in  English  life.  How  is  it  that  in  this 
Home  University  Library  he  is  the  second 
author  to  have  a  volume  to  himself,  only 
Shakespeare  preceding  him  ?  The  primary 
answer  is,  of  course,  that  we  know  him,  as  we 
know  no  other  man  whose  face  we  never  saw, 
whose  voice  we  never  heard.  Boswell  boasted 
that  he  had  "  Johnsonized  the  land,"  and 
that  he  had  shown  Johnson  in  his  book  as  no 
man  had  ever  been  shown  in  a  book  before  : 
and  the  boast  is  after  a  hundred  years  seen 
to  be  a  literal  statement  of  fact.  But  after 
all  Boswell  did  not  make  Johnson's  reputation. 
On  the  contrary,  it  was  Johnson's  name  that 
sold  Boswell's  book.  No  man  owes  so  much 
to  his  biographer  as  Johnson  to  Boswell,  but 
that  must  not  make  us  forget  that  Johnson 
was  the  most  famous  man  of  letters  in  England 
before  he  ever  saw  Boswell.  Boswell's  earnest 
desire  to  make  his  acquaintance  and  to  sit 
humbly  at  his  feet  was  only  an  extreme  in- 


14    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HJS  CIRCLE 

stance  of  an  attitude  of  respect  and  admiration, 
often  even  of  reverence,  commonly  felt  towards 
him  among  the  more  intelligent  and  serious 
portion  of  the  community.  He  had  not  then 
attained  to  the  position  of  something  like 
Dictatorship  which  he  filled  in  the  world  of 
English  letters  at  the  time  he  wrote  the  Lives 
of  the  Poets,  but,  except  the  Shakespeare  and 
the  Lives,  all  the  work  that  gave  him  that  posi- 
tion was  already  done.  In  this  case,  as  in  others, 
fame  increased  in  old  age  without  any  corre- 
sponding increase  in  achievement,  and  it  was 
the  easy  years  at  Streatham,  not  the  laborious 
years  at  Gk)ugh  Square,  that  saw  him  honoured 
and  courted  by  bishops  and  judges,  peers 
and  commoners,  by  the  greatest  of  English 
statesmen  and  the  greatest  of  English  painters. 
But  his  kingship  was  in  him  from  the  first. 
He  had  been  ava^  avSgaJv  even  among  his 
schoolfellows.  His  bigness,  in  more  ways  than 
one,  made  them  call  him  "  the  great  boy,"  and 
the  father  of  one  of  them  was  astute  enough 
even  then  to  perceive  that  he  would  be 
more  than  that :  "  you  call  him  the  great 
boy,  but  take  my  word  for  it,  he  will  one  day 
prove  a  great  man."  The  boys  looked  upon 
him  so  much  as  a  superior  being  to  themselves 
that  three  of  them,  of  whom  one  was  his  friend 
Hector,  whom  he  often  saw  in  later  life,  "  used 
to  come  in  the  morning  as  his  humble  attend- 


A  NATIONAL  INSTITUTION       15 

ants  and  carry  him  to  school.  One  in  the 
middle  stooped  while  he  sat  upon  his  back, 
and  one  on  each  side  supported  him,  and  thus 
he  was  borne  triumphant."  Such  a  tribute 
by  boys  to  intellectual  superiority  was  less 
rare  in  those  days  than  it  has  become  since  : 
but  it  would  not  be  easy  to  find  a  parallel 
to  it  at  any  time.  What  began  at  school 
continued  through  life.  Even  when  he  was 
poorest  and  most  obscure,  there  was  some- 
thing about  him  that  secured  respect.  It  is 
too  little  to  say  that  no  one  ever  imagined 
he  could  with  impunity  behave  disrespectfully 
to  Johnson.  No  one  ever  dared  to  do  so.  As 
he  flung  the  well-meant  boots  from  his  door 
at  Oxford,  so  throughout  life  he  knew  how 
to  make  all  men  afraid  to  insult,  slight,  or 
patronize  him. 

But  these,  after  all,  were  qualities  that 
would  only  affect  the  few  who  came  into 
personal  contact  with  him.  What  was  it 
that  affected  the  larger  world  and  gave  him 
the  fame  and  authority  of  his  later  years  ? 
Broadly  speaking  of  course  it  was  what  he 
had  written,  the  work  he  had  done,  his  poems, 
his  Rambler  and  Idler,  his  Rasselas,  his  Shake- 
speare, above  all  that  colossal  and  triumphant 
piece  of  single-handed  labour,  the  Dictionary 
of  the  English  Language.  But  there  was  more 
than  that.     Another  man  might  have  written 


16    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

books  quite  as  valuable,  and  attained  to 
nothing  like  Johnson's  position.  A  thousand 
people  to-day  read  what  Gray  was  writing  in 
those  years  for  one  who  reads  what  Johnson 
wrote,  and  they  are  quite  right.  Yet  Gray  in 
his  lifetime  had  little  fame  and  no  authority 
except  among  his  friends.  Pope,  again,  had 
of  course  immense  celebrity,  more  no  doubt 
than  Johnson  ever  had  among  men  of  letters ; 
but  he  never  became,  as  Johnson  did,  some- 
thing almost  like  a  national  institution.  What 
was  it  that  gave  Johnson  what  great  poets 
never  attained  ?  It  could  not  yet  be  his 
reputation  as  a  great  talker,  which  was  only 
beginning  to  spread.  We  think  of  him  as  the 
greatest  talker  the  world  has  ever  seen  :  but 
that  is  chiefly  due  to  Boswell,  of  course,  and 
we  are  speaking  at  present  of  the  years  before 
the  memorable  meeting  in  the  back  parlour 
of  Mr.  Davies's  shop  in  Russell  Street,  Covent 
Garden.  Besides,  good  talk,  except  in  Bos- 
well's  pages,  is  like  good  acting,  a  vain  thing 
to  those  who  only  know  it  by  hearsay.  We 
are  therefore  thrown  back  on  Johnson's  public 
work  for  an  explanation  of  the  position  he 
held.  What  was  it  in  his  work,  with  so  little 
of  Pope's  amazing  wit  and  brilliancy,  with 
so  little  of  Gray's  fine  imaginative  quality 
and  distinction,  prose  too,  in  the  main,  and 
not  poetry,  with  none  of  the  prestige  of  poetry. 


A  NATIONAL  INSTITUTION       17 

that  gave  him  what  neither  Pope  nor  Gray 
ever  received,  what  it  is  scarcely  too  much 
to  call,  the  homage  of  a  nation  ? 

The  answer  is  that,  especially  in  England, 
it  is  not  brillance  or  distinction  of  mind  that 
win  the  respect  of  a  nation.  George  III  had 
many  faults,  but  all  through  his  reign  he  was 
an  admirable  representative  of  the  general 
feelings  of  his  people.  And  he  never  did  a 
more  representative  act  than  when  he  gave 
Johnson  a  pension,  or  when  he  received  him 
in  the  library  of  Buckingham  House.  No 
doubt  many,  though  not  all,  of  Johnson's 
political  and  ecclesiastical  prejudices  were 
very  congenial  to  the  king,  but  plenty  of 
people  shared  George  Ill's  views  without 
gaining  from  him  an  ounce  of  respect.  What 
he  and  the  nation  dimly  felt  about  Johnson 
was  a  quality  belonging  less  to  the  author  than 
to  the  man.  The  English,  as  we  were  saying 
just  now,  think  of  themselves  as  a  plain  people, 
more  honest  and  direct  in  word  and  deed  than 
the  rest  of  the  world.  George  III  never 
affected  to  be  anything  but  a  plain  man,  was 
very  honest  according  to  his  lights,  and  never 
for  an  instant  failed  to  have  the  courage  of 
his  convictions.  Such  a  king  and  such  a 
people  would  inevitably  be  attracted  to  a  man 
of  Johnson's  fearless  sincerity  and  invincible 
common  sense.     The  ideal  of  the  nation  is 

B 


18    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

still  the  same.  Johnson  once  praised  the 
third  Duke  of  Devonshire  for  his  "  dogged 
veracity."  We  have  lately  seen  one  of  that 
duke's  descendants  and  successors,  a  man  of 
no  obvious  or  shining  talents,  attain  to  a  posi- 
tion of  almost  unique  authority  among  his 
fellow  countrymen  mainly  by  his  signal  posses- 
sion of  this  hereditary  gift  of  veracity,  honesty 
and  good  sense.  So  it  was  with  Johnson  him- 
self. Behind  all  his  learning  lay  something 
which  no  learned  language  could  conceal. 
"  On  s'attend  a  voir  un  auteur  et  on  trouve  un 
homme."  Authors  then,  as  now,  were  often 
thought  to  be  fantastical,  namby-pamby  per- 
sons, living  in  dreams,  sharing  none  of  the 
plain  man's  interests,  eager  and  querulous 
about  trifles  and  unrealities,  indifferent  and 
incapable  in  the  broad  world  of  life.  Nobody 
could  feel  that  about  Johnson. 

He  never  pretended  to  be  superior  to  the 
pains  or  pleasures  of  the  body  and  never  con- 
cealed his  interest  in  the  physical  basis  of  life. 
He  might  with  truth  have  spoken,  as  Pope 
did,  of  "  that  long  disease,  my  life,"  for  he 
declares  in  one  of  his  letters  that  after  he  was 
past  twenty  his  health  was  such  that  he 
seldom  enjoyed  a  single  day  of  ease ;  and  he 
was  so  scrupulously  truthful  when  he  had  a  pen 
in  his  hand  that  that  must  be  taken  as  at  the 
least  a  literal  record  of  the  truth  as  it  appeared 


A  NATIONAL  INSTITUTION       19 

to  him  at  that  moment.  But  though  he  never 
enjoyed  health  he  never  submitted  to  the 
tyranny  of  disease.  The  manHness  that  rings 
through  all  he  wrote  made  itself  felt  also  in 
his  life,  and  we  are  not  surprised  to  hear  from 
Mrs.  Thrale,  in  whose  house  he  lived  so  long, 
that  he  "  required  less  attendance  sick  or  well 
than  ever  I  saw  any  human  creature."  He 
could  conquer  disease  and  pain,  but  he  never 
affected  stoic  "  braveries,"  about  not  finding 
them  very  actual  and  disagreeable  realities. 
In  the  same  way,  he  never  pretended  not  to 
enjoy  the  universal  pleasures,  such  as  food 
and  sleep.  Boswell  records  him  as  saying  : 
"  Some  people  have  a  foolish  way  of  not  mind- 
ing, or  pretending  not  to  mind,  what  they  eat. 
For  my  part,  I  mind  my  belly  very  studiously 
and  very  carefully,  for  I  look  upon  it  that  he 
who  does  not  mind  his  belly  will  hardly  mind 
anything  else."  This  is  not  particularly 
refined  language,  and  Johnson's  manners 
at  the  dinner -table,  where,  until  he  had  satis- 
fied his  appetite,  he  was  "  totally  absorbed 
in  the  business  of  the  moment,"  were  not 
always  of  a  nature  to  please  refined  people. 
But  our  present  point  is  that  they  were  only 
an  exaggeration  of  that  sense  of  bodily  reali- 
ties which  is  one  of  the  things  that  has  always 
helped  to  secure  for  him  the  plain  man's 
confidence.     Throughout  his  life  he  kept  his 

B  2 


20    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

feet  firmly  based  on  the  solid  ground  of  fact. 
Human  life,  as  it  is  actually  and  visibly  lived, 
was  the  subject  of  his  study  and  conversation 
from  first  to  last.  He  always  put  fine-spun 
theories  to  mercilessly  positive  tests  such  as 
the  ordinary  man  understands  and  trusts 
at  once,  though  ordinary  men  have  not  the 
quickness  or  clearness  of  mind  to  apply  them. 
When  people  preached  a  theory  to  him  he 
was  apt  to  confute  them  simply  by  applying 
it  to  practice.  He  supposed  them  to  act  upon 
it,  and  its  absurdity  was  demonstrated.  One 
of  his  friends  was  Mrs.  Macaulay,  who  was 
a  republican  and  affected  doctrines  of  the 
equality  of  all  men.  When  Johnson  was  at 
her  house  one  day  he  put  on,  as  he  says,  "  a 
very  grave  countenance,"  and  said  to  her  : 
*'  Madam,  I  am  now  become  a  convert  to  your 
way  of  thinking.  I  am  convinced  that  all 
mankind  are  upon  an  equal  footing;  and  to 
give  you  an  unquestionable  proof,  madam,  that 
I  am  in  earnest,  here  is  a  very  sensible,  civil, 
well-behaved  fellow-citizen,  your  footman:  I 
desire  that  he  may  be  allowed  to  sit  down  and 
dine  with  us."  No  wonder  that,  as  he  adds, 
"  she  has  never  liked  me  since."  To  the 
political  thinker,  perhaps,  such  an  argument 
rather  proves  the  insincerity  of  Mrs.  Macaulay 
than  what  he  claimed  for  it,  "  the  absurdity 
of  the  levelling  doctrine."     But  it  exhibits, 


A  NATIONAL  INSTITUTION        21 

with  a  force  that  no  theoretical  reasoning 
could  match,  the  difficulty  which  doctrines 
of  equality  will  always  have  to  meet  in  the 
resistance  of  human  nature  as  it  is  and  as  it  is 
likely  to  remain  for  a  long  time  to  come.  And 
it  illustrates  the  habit  of  Johnson's  mind  which 
has  always  made  the  unlearned  hear  him  so 
gladly,  the  habit  of  forcing  theory  to  the  test 
of  fact.  For  quick  as  he  was,  perhaps  quicker 
than  any  recorded  man,  at  the  tierce  and  quart 
of  theoretical  argument,  he  commonly  used 
the  bludgeon  stroke  of  practice  to  give  his  op- 
ponent the  final  blow.  We  are  vaguely  dis- 
trustful of  our  reasoning  powers,  but  every 
man  thinks  he  can  understand  facts  and  figures. 
The  quickness  of  Johnson  in  applying  arith- 
metical tests  to  careless  statements  must 
have  been  another  of  the  elements  in  the  fear, 
respect  and  confidence  he  inspired.  A  gentle- 
man once  told  him  that  in  France,  as  soon  as 
a  man  of  fashion  marries,  he  takes  an  opera 
girl  into  keeping,  and  he  declared  this  to  be 
the  general  custom.  "  Pray,  sir,"  said  John- 
son, "  how  many  opera  girls  may  there  be  ?  " 
He  answered,  "  About  four  score."  "  Well 
then,  sir,"  replied  Johnson,  "  you  see  there 
can  be  no  more  than  fourscore  men  of  fashion 
who  can  do  this." 

There  is  no  art  of  persuasion,  as  all  orators 
know,  so  overwhelming  in  effect  as  this  appeal, 


22    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

or  even  appearance  of  appeal,  to  a  court  in 
which  every  man  feels  as  much  at  home  as  the 
speaker  himself.  And  though  Johnson's  use 
of  it  is,  of  course,  seen  at  its  most  telling  in 
his  conversation,  it  was  in  him  from  the  first, 
is  a  conspicuous  feature  of  all  he  wrote,  and 
was  undoubtedly  a  powerful  factor  in  winning 
for  him  the  reputation  of  manliness  and  hon- 
esty he  enjoyed.  Take,  for  instance,  a  few 
paragraphs  from  his  analysis  of  the  rhetoric 
of  authors  on  the  subject  of  poverty.  It  is 
No.  202  of  The  Rambler.  There  is  no  better 
evidence  of  his  perfect  freedom  from  that 
slavery  to  words  which  is  the  besetting  sin 
of  authors. 

"  There  are  few  words  of  which  the  reader 
believes  himself  better  to  know  the  import 
than  of  poverty ;  yet  whoever  studies  either 
the  poets  or  philosophers  will  find  such  an 
account  of  the  condition  expressed  by  that 
term  as  his  experience  or  observation  will  not 
easily  discover  to  be  true.  Instead  of  the 
meanness,  distress,  complaint,  anxiety  and 
dependence,  which  have  hitherto  been  com- 
bined in  his  ideas  of  poverty,  he  will  read 
of  content,  innocence  and  cheerfulness,  of 
health  and  safety,  tranquillity  and  freedom; 
of  pleasures  not  known  but  to  men  unen- 
cumbered with  possessions ;  and  of  sleep  that 
sheds  his  balsamick  anodynes  only  on  the 


A  NATIONAL  INSTITUTION       23 

cottage.  Such  are  the  blessings  to  be  ob- 
tained by  the  resignation  of  riches,  that  kings 
might  descend  from  their  thrones  and  generals 
retire  from  a  triumph,  only  to  slumber  undis- 
turbed in  the  elysium  of  poverty." 

**  But  it  will  be  found  upon  a  nearer  view  that 
they  who  extol  the  happiness  of  poverty  do 
not  mean  the  same  state  with  those  who 
deplore  its  miseries.  Poets  have  their  imagi- 
nations filled  with  ideas  of  magnificence ;  and 
being  accustomed  to  contemplate  the  downfall 
of  empires,  or  to  contrive  forms  of  lamenta- 
tion for  monarchs  in  distress,  rank  all 
the  classes  of  mankind  in  a  state  of  poverty 
who  make  no  approaches  to  the  dignity  of 
crowns.  To  be  poor,  in  the  epick  language, 
is  only  not  to  command  the  wealth  of  nations, 
nor  to  have  fleets  and  armies  in  pay. 

"  Vanity  has  perhaps  contributed  to  this 
impropriety  of  style.  He  that  wishes  to 
become  a  philosopher  at  a  cheap  rate  easily 
gratifies  his  ambition  by  submitting  to  poverty 
when  he  does  not  feel  it,  and  by  boasting  his 
contempt  of  riches  when  he  has  already  more 
than  he  enjoys.  He  who  would  show  the 
extent  of  his  views  and  grandeur  of  his  con- 
ceptions, or  discover  his  acquaintance  with 
splendour  and  magnificence,  may  talk,  like 
Cowley,    of   an    humble    station    and    quiet 


24    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

obscurity,  of  the  paucity  of  nature's  wants, 
and  the  inconveniences  of  superfluity,  and 
at  last,  Hke  him,  Hmit  his  desires  to  five 
hundred  pounds  a  year;  a  fortune  indeed, 
not  exuberant,  when  we  compare  it  with  the 
expenses  of  pride  and  luxury,  but  to  which 
it  little  becomes  a  philosopher  to  affix  the 
name  of  poverty,  since  no  man  can  with 
any  propriety  be  termed  poor  who  does  not 
see  the  greater  part  of  mankind  richer  than 
himself." 

What  good  sense,  what  resolute  grip  on 
the  realities  of  life,  what  a  love  of  truth  and 
seriousness,  shines  through  the  long  sentences  ! 
The  form  and  language  of  the  essay  may 
perhaps  be  too  suggestive  of  the  professional 
author;  but  how  much  the  opposite,  how 
very  human  and  real,  is  the  stuff  and  sub- 
stance of  what  he  says  !  Professor  Raleigh 
once  proposed  as  a  test  of  great  literature,  that 
it  should  be  found  applicable  and  useful  in 
circumstances  very  different  from  those  that 
were  in  the  author's  mind  when  he  wrote.  By 
that  test  these  words  of  Johnson  are  certainly 
great  literature.  The  degrees  of  wealth  and 
poverty  have  varied  infinitely  in  the  history 
of  the  world.  They  were  very  different  under 
the  Roman  Empire  from  what  they  became  in 
the  Middle  Age ;  by  Johnson's  day  they  had 
become  quite  unlike  what  they  had  been  in 


A  NATIONAL  INSTITUTION       25 

the  days  of  Dante  and  Chaucer;  and  they 
have  again  changed  almost  or  quite  as  much 
in  the  hundred  and  thirty  years  that  have 
passed  since  he  died.  Yet  was  there  ever 
a  time,  will  there  ever  be,  when  the  self- 
deception  of  the  human  heart  or  the  loose 
thinking  of  the  human  mind,  will  not  allow 
men  who  never  knew  poverty  to  boast  of 
their  cheerful  endurance  of  it  ?  Have  we 
not  to-day  reached  a  time  when  men  with  an 
assured  income  of  ten,  twenty,  or  even  thirty 
pounds  a  week,  affect  to  consider  themselves 
too  poor  to  be  able  to  afford  to  marry  ?  And 
where  will  such  people  better  find  the  needed 
recall  to  fact,  than  in  Johnson's  trenchant 
and  unanswerable  appeal  to  the  obvious 
truth  as  all  can  see  it,  if  they  will,  for  them- 
selves, in  the  visible  conditions  of  the  world 
about  them :  "No  man  can,  with  any  pro- 
priety, be  termed  poor  who  does  not  see  the 
greater  part  of  mankind  richer  than  himself  ?  " 
This  hold  on  the  realities  of  life  is  the  most 
essential  element  in  Johnson's  greatness. 
Ordinary  people  felt  it  from  the  first,  however 
unconsciously,  and  looked  to  Johnson  as 
something  more  than  an  author.  Pope  might 
do  himself  honour  by  acclaiming  the  verses 
of  the  unknown  poet :  Warburton  might  hasten 
to  pay  his  tribute  to  the  unknown  critic  :  but 
they  could  not  give  Johnson,  what  neither 


26    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

of  them  could  have  gained  for  himself,  the 
confidence,  soon  to  be  felt  by  the  whole 
reading  part  of  the  population  of  England, 
that  here  was  a  man  uniquely  rich  in  the 
wisdom  of  every  day,  learned  but  no  victim 
of  learning,  sincerely  religious  but  with  a 
religion  that  never  tried  to  ignore  the  facts 
of  human  life,  a  scholar,  a  philosopher  and 
a  Christian,  but  also  pre-eminently  a  man. 

A  grave  man,  no  doubt,  apt  to  deal  in 
grave  subjects,  especially  when  he  had  his 
pen  in  his  hand.  But  that  helped  rather  than 
hindered  his  influence.  He  would  not  have 
liked  to  think  that  he  owed  part  of  his  own 
authority  to  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth 
century  Puritans,  but  no  doubt  he  did.  Still 
the  Puritan  movement  only  deepened  a 
vein  of  seriousness  which  had  been  in  the 
English  from  Saxon  days.  One  may  see  it 
everywhere.  The  Puritans  would  not  have 
been  the  power  they  were  if  they  had  not 
found  congenial  soil  in  the  English  character. 
The  Reformation  itself,  a  Protestant  may  be 
excused  for  thinking,  owes  its  ultimate 
triumph  in  England  partly  to  the  fact  that 
Englishmen  saw  in  it  a  movement  towards  a 
more  serious  and  ethical  religion  than  the 
Catholicism  either  of  the  Middle  Age  or  of 
the  Jesuits.  The  same  thing  may  be  seen  in 
the  narrower  fields  of  literature.     The  Renais- 


A  NATIONAL  INSTITUTION        27 

sance  on  the  whole  takes  a  much  more  ethical 
note  in  England  than,  for  instance,  in  France. 
A  little  later  indeed,  in  the  France  of  Pascal 
and  Bossuet,  books  of  devotion  and  theology 
were  very  widely  read,  as  may  be  seen  in  the 
letters  of  Madame  de  Sevigne;  but  they  can 
never  have  had  anything  like  the  circulation 
which  they  had  in  England,  both  in  the  seven- 
teenth and  eighteenth  centuries.  Every  one 
who  looks  at  an  English  country-house 
library  is  struck  by  the  abundant  provision 
of  sermons,  mainly  collected,  like  everything 
else  indeed,  in  the  eighteenth  century.  And 
every  reader  of  Boswell's  Johnson  has  been 
impressed  by  the  frequent  recurrence  of 
devotional  and  religious  books  in  the  literary 
talk  of  the  day,  and,  what  is  perhaps  more 
remarkable,  by  the  fact  that  wherever 
Boswell  and  Johnson  go  they  constantly  find 
volumes  of  sermons  lying  about,  not  only  in 
the  private  houses,  but  also  in  the  inns  where 
they  stay.  There  never  was  a  period  when 
*'  conduct,"  as  Matthew  Arnold  used  to  call 
it,  was  so  admitted  to  be  the  three-fourths  of 
life  he  claimed  for  it,  as  it  was  between  the 
Restoration  and  the  French  Revolution.  It 
was  conduct,  not  faith,  ethics  not  religion, 
the  "  whole  duty  of  man  "  in  this  life,  not 
his  supernatural  destiny  in  another,  that 
mainly  occupied  the  minds  of  serious  people 


28    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

in  that  unecclesiastical  age.  And  Johnson, 
definite  Christian,  definite  Churchman  as  he 
was,  full  even  of  ecclesiastical  prejudices,  was 
just  the  man  to  appeal  to  a  generation  with 
such  interests  as  these. 

No  questions  occupied  him  so  much  as 
moral  questions.  He  was  all  his  life  con- 
sidering how  he  ought  to  live,  and  trying  to 
live  better.  People  who  are  in  earnest  about 
these  things  have  always  found  not  only  his 
published  prayers  or  his  moral  essays,  but 
his  life  as  told  by  Boswell  full  of  fortifying 
and  stimulating  ethical  food.  All  alike  ex- 
hibit a  mind  that  recognized  the  problem  of 
the  conduct  of  life  as  the  one  thing  of  supreme 
interest  to  a  rational  man,  and  recognized 
it  as  above  all  things  a  moral  problem.  His 
treatment  of  it  is  usually  based  on  reason, 
not  on  mere  authority  or  orthodoxy,  or  even 
on  Christianity  at  all.  Rasselas,  for  instance, 
his  most  popular  ethical  work,  which  was 
translated  into  most  of  the  European  lan- 
guages, does  not  contain  a  single  allusion  to 
Christianity.  Its  atmosphere  is  neither  Ma- 
homedan  nor  Christian,  but  that  of  pure 
reason.  And  when  elsewhere  he  does  discuss 
definitely  Christian  problems  it  is  usually 
in  the  light  of  free  and  unfettered  reason. 
Reason  by  itself  has  probably  never  made 
any  one  a  Christian,  and  certainly  Johnson's 


A  NATIONAL  INSTITUTION       29 

Christianity  was  not  an  affair  of  the  reason 
alone,  but  he  was  seldom  afraid  to  test  it  by 
the  touchstone  of  reason.  That  was  not 
merely  a  thing  done  in  accordance  with  the 
fashion  of  his  age;  it  was  the  inevitable 
activity  of  an  acute  and  powerful  mind. 
But  the  fact  that  he  had  in  him  this  absorbing 
ethical  interest,  and  that  throughout  his 
life  he  was  applying  to  it  a  rare  intellectual 
energy,  and  what  was  rarer  still  in  those 
fields,  a  close  and  unfailing  grip  on  life  and 
reality,  gave  him  that  peculiar  position  to 
which  he  came  in  his  last  years;  one  of  an 
authority  which  was  probably  not  equalled 
by  that  of  any  professed  philosopher  or  divine. 
Still,  his  seriousness  could  not  by  itself 
have  given  him  this  position.  The  English 
people  like  their  public  men  to  be  serious, 
but  they  do  not  like  them  to  be  nothing 
else.  The  philosopher  and  the  saint,  the 
merely  intellectual  man  or  the  merely  spiritual 
man,  have  never  been  popular  characters  or 
become  leaders  of  men,  here  any  more  than 
elsewhere.  The  essential  element  in  the 
confidence  Johnson  inspired  was  not  his 
seriousness  :  it  was  his  sovereign  sanity,  the 
unfailing  common  sense,  to  which  allusion  has 
already  been  made.  He  was  pre-eminently 
a  bookish  man,  but  he  was  conspicuously 
free  from  the  unreality  that  is  so  often  felt 


30    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

in  the  characters  of  such  men.  He  knew 
from  the  first  how  to  strike  a  note  which 
showed  that  he  was  well  aware  of  the  differ- 
ence between  literature  and  life  and  their 
relative  importance. 

"  Deign  on  the  passing  world  to  turn  thine  eyes, 
And  pause  awhile  from  Letters,  to  be  wise." 

So  he  said,  as  a  young  man,  in  his  finest 
poem,  and  so  he  acted  all  through  the  years. 
Scholar  as  he  was,  and  very  conscious  of  the 
dignity  of  scholarship,  he  never  forgot  that 
scholarship  faded  into  insignificance  in  pre- 
sence of  the  greater  issues  of  life.  In  his 
most  scholarly  moment,  in  the  Preface  to 
the  Dictionary,  he  will  throw  out  such  a 
remark  as  "  this  recommendation  of  steadiness 
and  uniformity  (in  spelling)  does  not  proceed 
from  an  opinion  that  particular  combinations 
of  letters  have  much  influence  on  human 
happiness."  Such  a  sentence  could  not  but 
give  plain  people  a  feeling  of  unusual  con- 
fidence in  the  writer.  How  different  they 
would  at  once  feel  it  to  be,  how  different, 
indeed,  we  still  feel  it,  from  the  too  frequent 
pedantry  of  critics,  insisting  with  solemn 
importance  or  querulous  ill-temper  upon  tri- 
fling points  of  grammar  or  style.  We  know 
that  this  man  has  a  scale  of  things  in  his  mind ; 


A  NATIONAL  INSTITUTION        31 

he  will  not  vilify  his  opponent's  character  for 
the  sake  of  a  difference  about  a  Greek  con- 
struction, or  make  a  lifelong  quarrel  over 
the  question  of  the  maiden  name  and  birth- 
place of  Shelley's  great-grandmother.  From 
first  to  last  he  was  emphatically  a  human 
being,  with  a  feeling  for  human  life  as  a 
whole,  and  in  all  its  parts.  He  said  once  : 
"  A  mere  antiquarian  is  a  rugged  being," 
and  he  was  never  himself  a  mere  grammarian 
or  a  mere  scholar,  but  a  man  with  an  eager 
interest  in  all  the  business  and  pleasure  of 
life.  His  high  sense  of  the  dignity  of  liter- 
ature looked  to  its  large  and  human  side,  not 
to  any  parade  of  curious  information.  Every- 
where in  his  writings  plain  people  are  concili- 
ated by  his  frank  attitude  as  to  his  own  calling, 
by  his  perfect  freedom  from  any  pontifical 
airs  of  the  mystery  of  authorship.  "  I  could 
have  written  longer  notes,"  he  says  in  the 
great  Preface  to  his  Shakespeare,  "  for  the 
art  of  writing  notes  is  not  of  difficult  attain- 
ment." "It  is  impossible  for  an  expositor 
not  to  write  too  little  for  some,  and  too  much 
for  others."  "  I  have  indeed  disappointed 
no  opinion  more  than  my  own;  yet  I  have 
endeavoured  to  perform  my  task  with  no 
slight  solicitude.  Not  a  single  passage  in 
the  whole  work  has  appeared  to  me  corrupt 
which  I  have  not  attempted  to  restore;  or 


32    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

obscure  which  I  have  not  endeavoured  to 
illustrate.  In  many  I  have  failed,  like  others, 
and  from  many,  after  all  my  efforts,  I  have 
retreated,  and  confessed  the  repulse.  I  have 
not  passed  over  with  affected  superiority 
what  is  equally  difficult  to  the  reader  and  to 
myself,  but  where  I  could  not  instruct  him 
have  owned  my  ignorance.  I  might  easily 
have  accumulated  a  mass  of  seeming  learning 
upon  easy  scenes ;  but  it  ought  not  to  be 
imputed  to  negligence  that,  where  nothing 
was  necessary,  nothing  has  been  done,  or 
that,  where  others  have  said  enough,  I  have 
said  no  more." 

A  man  who  writes  like  this  is  sure  of  his 
public  at  once.  He  is  instantly  seen  to  be 
too  proud,  as  well  as  too  sincere,  too  great 
a  man,  in  fact,  altogether,  to  stoop  to  the 
dishonest  little  artifices  by  which  vanity 
tries  to  steal  applause.  In  his  writings  as 
in  his  talk,  he  was  not  afraid  to  be  seen  for 
what  he  actually  was;  and  just  as,  when 
asked  how  he  came  to  explain  the  word 
Pastern  as  meaning  the  knee  of  a  horse,  he 
replied  at  once,  "  Ignorance,  madam,  pure 
ignorance,"  so  in  his  books  he  made  no 
attempt  to  be  thought  wiser  or  more  learned 
than  he  was.  And  this  modesty  which  he 
showed  for  himself  he  showed  for  his  author 
too.     The  common  notion  that  he  depreciated 


A  NATIONAL  INSTITUTION       33 

Shakespeare  is,  indeed,  an  entire  mistake. 
There  were  certainly  things  in  Shakespeare 
which  were  out  of  his  reach,  but  that  does  not 
alter  the  fact  that  Shakespeare  has  never 
been  better  praised  than  in  Johnson's  Preface. 
But  he  will  not  say  what  he  does  not  mean 
about  Shakespeare  any  more  than  about 
himself.  There  is  in  him  nothing  at  all  of 
the  subtle  trickery  of  the  common  critic  who 
thinks  to  magnify  his  own  importance  by 
extravagant  and  insincere  laudation  of  his 
author.  He  is  not  afraid  to  speak  of  the 
poet  with  the  same  simplicity  as  he  speaks 
of  the  editor.  "  Yet  it  must  be  at  last 
confessed  that,  as  we  owe  everything  to  him, 
he  owes  something  to  us ;  that,  if  much  of  his 
praise  is  paid  by  perception  and  judgment, 
much  is  likewise  given  by  custom  and  venera- 
tion." He  even  adds  that  Shakespeare  has 
*'  perhaps  not  one  play  which,  if  it  were  now 
exhibited  as  the  work  of  a  contemporary 
writer,  would  be  heard  to  the  conclusion." 
Whether  that  is  true  or  not  of  Johnson's 
day  or  of  our  own — and  let  us  not  be  too 
hastily  sure  of  its  untruth — at  least  the  man 
who  wrote  it  in  the  preface  to  an  edition 
of  Shakespeare  lacked  neither  honesty  nor 
courage.  And  he  had  then,  as  he  has  still, 
the  reward  which  the  most  popular  of  the 
virtues  will  always  bring. 

G 


84    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

With  courage  and  honesty  usually  go 
simplicity  and  directness.  That  is  not  the 
first  praise  that  Johnson  would  win  from 
people  familiar  with  caricatures  of  his  style. 
But  it  is  a  complete  mistake  to  suppose  that 
he  always  wore  that  heavy  armour  of  magni- 
loquence. He  could  be  as  free  from  pedantry 
of  phrase  as  he  always  was  from  pedantry  of 
thought.  He  is  not  only  a  supreme  master 
of  common  sense ;  he  is  a  supreme  master  of 
the  language  of  common  sense.  He  has  the  gift 
of  saying  things  which  no  one  can  misunder- 
stand and  no  one  can  forget.  His  common 
sense  is  what  its  name  implies,  no  private 
possession  thrust  upon  the  minds  of  others, 
but  their  own  thoughts  expressed  for  them. 
That  was  one  of  the  secrets  of  the  unique 
confidence  he  inspired.  The  jury  gave  him 
their  verdict  because  he  always  put  the  issue 
on  a  basis  they  could  understand.  His 
answer  to  the  specious  arguments  of  the 
learned  is  always  an  appeal  to  what  it  needs 
no  learning  to  know.  The  critics  of  Pope's 
Homer  are  met  by  the  unanswerable  retort  : 
"  To  a  thousand  cavils  one  answer  is  sufficient. 
The  purpose  of  a  writer  is  to  be  read."  To 
Pope  himself  affecting  scorn  of  the  great,  the 
same  merciless  measure  of  common  knowledge 
is  dealt.  "  His  scorn  of  the  great  is  too 
often  repeated  to   be  real  :   no  man  thinks 


A  NATIONAL  INSTITUTION       35 

much  of  that  which  he  despises."  And  so 
once  more  to  Pope's  victims.  If  they  would 
have  kept  quiet,  he  says,  the  Dunciad  would 
have  been  little  read  :  "  For  whom  did  it 
concern  to  know  that  one  or  another  scribbler 
was  a  dunce  ?  "  But  this  is  what  the  dunces 
are  the  last  people  to  realize  :  indeed,  "  every 
man  is  of  importance  to  himself,  and  therefore, 
in  his  own  opinion,  to  others  " ;  so  the  victim 
is  the  first  to  "  publish  injuries  or  misfortunes 
which  had  never  been  known  unless  related 
by  himself,  and  at  which  those  that  hear 
them  will  only  laugh ;  for  no  man  sympathizes 
with  the  sorrows  of  vanity." 

Every  one  who  is  much  read  in  Johnson 
will  recall  for  himself  other  and  perhaps 
better  instances  than  these  of  his  rare  faculty 
of  gathering  together  into  a  sentence  some 
piece  of  the  common  stock  of  wisdom  or 
observation,  and  applying  it  simply,  directly 
and  unanswerably  to  the  immediate  business 
in  hand.  Is  there  anything  which  clears  and 
relieves  an  argument  so  well  ?  "  The  true 
state  of  every  nation  is  the  state  of  common 
life  " ;  "  If  one  was  to  think  constantly  of 
death  the  business  of  life  would  stand  still  " ; 
"  To  be  happy  at  home  is  the  ultimate  result 
of  all  ambition."  How  firm  on  one's  feet,  on 
the  solid  ground  of  truth,  one  feels  when  one 
reads  such  sentences  !  The  writer  of  them 
c  2 


36    DR.   JOHNSON   AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

is  at  once  recognized  as  no  maker  of  phrases, 
no  victim  of  cloudy  speculations,  self-deceived 
and  the  deceiver  of  others,  but  a  man  who  kept 
himself  always  close  to  the  realities  of  things. 
And  when  to  this,  which  had  been  always  there, 
was  added  the  special  charm  of  the  Lives  of 
the  Poets,  the  old  man  speaking,  often  in  the 
first  person,  without  reserve  or  mystery,  out 
of  the  fullness  of  his  knowledge  of  books  and 
men  and  the  general  life  which  is  greater  than 
either,  then  the  feeling  entertained  for  him 
grew  into  something  not  very  unlike  affection. 
The  man  who  could  not  be  concealed  even 
by  the  grave  abstractions  of  the  earlier  works, 
was  now  seen  and  heard  as  a  friend  speaking 
face  to  face  with  those  who  understood 
him.  The  wisdom,  and  learning  and  piety, 
the  shrewdness  and  vigour  and  wit,  the  in- 
vincible common  sense,  took  visible  shape  in 
the  face  of  Samuel  Johnson,  were  heard  in 
his  audible  voice,  became  known  and  honoured 
and  loved  as  a  kind  of  national  glory,  the 
embodiment  of  the  mind  and  character  of 
the  English  people.  And  then,  of  course, 
came  Bos  well.  And  what  might  have  died 
away  as  a  memory  or  a  legend  was  made 
secure  from  mortality  by  a  work  of  genius. 
At  the  moment  Boswell  had  only  to  complete 
an  impression  already  made.  But,  strong  as 
it  was  at  the  time,  without  Boswell  it  could 


THE   GENIUS   OF   BOSWELL       87 

not  have  lasted.  Those  who  had  sat  with 
Johnson  at  the  Mitre  or  "  The  Club  "  could 
not  long  survive,  and  could  not  leave  their 
eyes  and  ears  behind  them.  Literary  fashions 
changed;  popular  taste  began  to  ask  ever- 
more for  amusement  and  less  for  instruction 
or  edification;  and  the  works  of  Johnson 
were  no  longer  read,  except  by  students  of 
English  literature.  But  for  Boswell  the  great 
man's  name  might  soon  have  been  unknown 
to  any  but  bookish  men.  It  is  due  to  Boswell 
that  journalists  quote  him,  and  cabmen  tell 
stories  about  him.  Johnson  had  himself 
almost  every  quality  that  makes  for  survival 
except  genius;  and  that,  by  the  happiest  of 
fates  for  himself  and  for  us,  he  found  in  his 
biographer. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE   GENIUS    OF   BOSWELL 

The  word  genius  seems  a  strange  one  to 
apply  to  Boswell.  Macaulay  has  had  his 
hour  of  authority  with  most  of  us,  and, 
unluckily  for  him  and  for  us,  the  worst  passages 
in  his  Essays  are  often  better    remembered 


38    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

than  the  greatest  chapters  in  his  History.  It 
has  proved  his  ill -fortune  as  well  as  his  glory 
to  have  written  so  vividly  that  the  mind's  eye 
will  still  see  what  he  wrote  clear  before  it, 
though  twenty  years  may  lie  between  it  and 
the  actual  sight  of  the  printed  page.  At  his 
worst  he  is  like  an  advertisement  hoarding, 
crude,  violent,  vulgar,  but  impossible  to 
escape.  The  essay  on  Croker's  Boswell  is 
one  of  those  unfortunate  moments.  It  is, 
unhappily,  far  better  known  than  its  author's 
article  on  Johnson  ^vi'itten  for  the  Encyclopce- 
dia  Britannica,  and  its  violence  still  takes  the 
memory  by  assault.  No  one  forgets  the  disgust- 
ing description  of  Johnson,  or  the  insults 
heaped  upon  Boswell.  Least  of  all  can  anybody 
forget  the  famous  paradox  about  the  contrast 
between  Boswell  and  his  book.  As  a  bio- 
grapher, according  to  Macaulay,  Boswell  has 
easily  surpassed  all  rivals.  "  Homer  is  not 
more  decidedly  the  first  of  Epic  poets, 
Shakespeare  is  not  more  decidedly  the  first 
of  dramatists,  Demosthenes  is  not  more 
decidedly  the  first  of  orators  than  Boswell 
is  the  first  of  biographers.  He  has  no  second. 
Eclipse  is  first,  and  the  rest  nowhere."  And 
yet  this  same  Boswell  is  "  a  man  of  the  meanest 
and  feeblest  intellect  " ;  and,  strangest  of  all, 
only  achieves  his  amazing  success  by  force  of 
his  worthlessness  and  folly.     "  If  he  had  not 


THE   GENIUS   OF   BOSWELL       39 

teen  a  great  fool  he  would  never  have  been 
a  great  wi-iter." 

Macaulay  was  the  most  self-confident  of 
men.  But,  though  he  set  his  opinion  with 
assurance  against  that  of  any  other  critic, 
there  was  one  verdict  he  respected,  the  verdict 
of  time.  He  would  not  have  been  astonished 
to  hear  that  in  the  eighty  years  since  his  essay 
was  written  the  fame  of  Boswell's  book  has 
continually  increased.  But  few  things  that 
have  happened  since  then  would  have  sur- 
prised him  more  than  to  be  told  that,  in  a 
volume  published  only  fifty  years  after  his 
death  and  in  part  officially  addressed  to  his 
own  University  of  Cambridge,  a  Professor  of 
English  Literature,  one  of  the  two  or  three 
universally  acknowledged  masters  of  criticism, 
would  be  found  quietly  letting  fall,  as  a  thing 
about  which  there  need  be  no  discussion,  a 
sentence  beginning  with  the  words  :  "A  wiser 
man  than  Macaulay,  James  Boswell." 

It  may  be  well,  before  speaking  further  of 
Johnson,  to  say  something  about  the  man  to 
whom  we  owe  most  of  our  knowledge  of  him, 
the  most  important  member  of  his  circle, 
this  same  James  Boswell.  Like  all  good 
biographers,  he  has  put  himself  into  his  book; 
and  we  know  him  as  well  as  we  know  Johnson, 
as  we  know  no  other  two  men,  perhaps,  in 
the  history  of  the  world.     It  cannot  be  denied 


40    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

that,  when  we  put  his  great  book  down,  it  is 
not  very  easy  to  follow  Sir  Walter  Raleigh 
in  talking  of  him  as  a  wise  man,  or  even  as  a 
wiser  man  than  Macaulay.  If  Boswell  and 
Macaulay  were  put  into  competition  in  a 
prize  for  wisdom,  no  ordinary  examiners 
would  give  it  to  Boswell.  By  the  only  tests 
they  could  apply,  Macaulay  must  far  outstrip 
him.  The  wisdom  which  enabled  Macaulay 
to  render  splendid  services  to  the  State  and  to 
literature,  and  gave  him  wealth,  happiness, 
popularity  and  a  peerage,  is  as  easily  tested, 
and,  it  must  be  confessed,  as  real,  as  the 
unwisdom  which  ended  in  Boswell  dying  the 
dishonoured  death  of  a  drunkard,  and  leaving 
a  name  of  which  his  descendants  felt  the 
shame  at  least  as  much  as  the  glory. 

But  there  are  other  tests,  and  though  their 
superior  value  may  be  doubted,  they  ought 
not  to  be  altogether  ignored.  Macaulay,  who 
knew  everything  and  achieved  so  much,  spent 
his  whole  life  in  visible  and  external  activities — 
talking,  reading,  writing,  governing;  and  was 
admired,  and,  indeed,  admirable  in  them  all. 
But  of  the  wisdom  which  realizes  how  essen- 
tially inferior  all  measurable  doing,  however 
triumphant,  is  to  being,  which  is  immeasurable, 
the  wisdom  which  is  occupied  with  the  ultimate 
issues  of  life  and  death,  he  had  apparently  as 
little  as  any  man  who  ever  lived.     He  seems 


THE   GENIUS   OF   BOSWELL       41 

always  to  have  been  one  of  those  active, 
hurrying,  useful  persons  who — 

*' Fancy  that  they  put  forth  all  their  life 
And  never  know  how  with  the  soul  it  fares." 

Whatever  can  be  said  against  Boswell  that 
cannot  be  said.  Of  this  inner  wisdom,  this 
quietness  of  thought,  this  "  folic  des  gran- 
deurs "  of  the  soul,  he  had  a  thousand  times 
as  much  as  Macaulay.  He  could  not  cling 
to  it  to  the  end,  he  could  not  victoriously  live 
by  it  and  make  it  himself ;  but  he  had  seen  the 
vision  which  Macaulay  never  saw,  and  he  never 
altogether  forgot  it.  Every  man  is  partly 
a  lost  soul.  So  far  as  Boswell  was  that,  he 
knew  it  in  all  the  bitter  certainty  of  tears.  So 
far  as  Macaulay  was,  he  was  as  unconscious 
of  it  as  the  beasts  that  perish.  And  the 
kingdom  of  wisdom,  like  the  Kingdom  of 
Heaven,  is  more  easily  entered  by  those  who 
know  that  they  are  outside  it,  than  by  those 
who  do  not  know  that  there  is  such  a  place 
and  are  quite  content  where  they  are. 

But  these  are  high  matters  into  which  there 
is  no  need  to  go  further.  It  is  necessary,  how- 
ever, to  say  a  little  more  about  Boswell's 
character  and  abilities.  He  and  Johnson  are 
now  linked  together  for  all  eternity;  and 
everybody  who  takes  an  interest  in  Johnson 
is  interested  in  Boswell  too.     It  ought  to  be 


42     DR.    JOHNSON   ANX>   HIS   CIRCLE 

much  more  than  interest,  and  in  all  true 
Johnsonians  it  is.  Without  Boswell,  we 
should  have  respected  Johnson,  honoured 
him  as  a  man  and  a  -writer,  liked  him  as  "  a 
true-born  Englishman,"  but  we  could  not 
have  known  him  enough  to  love  him.  By  the 
help  of  Boswell,  we  can  walk  and  talk  with 
him,  dine  with  him,  be  with  him  at  his  prayers 
as  well  as  at  his  pleasures,  laugh  with  him, 
learn  of  him  and  disagree  with  him ;  above  all, 
love  him  as  we  only  can  love  a  human  being, 
and  never  a  mere  wise  man  or  great  writer. 
No  Englishman  doubts  that  Boswell  has  given 
us  one  of  the  great  books  of  the  world.  But 
before  we  realize  its  greatness,  we  realize 
its  pleasantness,  its  companionableness.  The 
Life  of  Johnson  and  the  Journal  of  a  Tour  to 
the  Hebrides  may  be  taken  for  practical 
purposes  as  one  book;  and  it  has  some  claim 
to  be  the  most  companionable  book  in  the 
world.  There  is  no  book  like  it  for  a  solitary 
meal.  A  novel,  if  it  is  good  for  anything,  is 
too  engrossing  for  a  dinner  companion.  It  is 
impossible  to  put  it  down.  It  interrupts  the 
business  of  dining  and  results  in  cold  food  and 
indigestion.  A  book  of  short  poems — ^the 
Odes  of  Horace,  the  Fables  of  La  Fontaine, 
the  Sonnets  of  Shakespeare  or  Wordsworth — 
is  much  more  to  the  purpose.  One  may  read 
an  Ode  or  a  Sonnet  quickly  and  then  turn 


THE   GENIUS   OF   BOSWELL       43 

again  to  one's  dinner,  carrying  the  fine  verse 
in  one's  mind  and  tasting  it  at  leisure  as  one 
holds  good  wine  in  the  mouth  before  letting 
it  pass  away  into  forgetfulness.  But  poetry 
is  not  for  every  man,  nor  for  every  mood  of  any 
man  :  and  the  moment  of  dinner  is  not  with 
most  men  the  moment  when  they  appear 
most  poetic  either  to  others  or  to  themselves. 
But  is  there  any  time  which  is  not  the  time 
for  Boswell  ?  He  does  not  ask  for  a  mood 
which  may  not  be  forthcoming  :  he  does  not 
demand  an  attention  which  it  is  inconvenient 
to  give.  We  can  take  him  up  and  lay  him 
down  as  and  when  we  will.  And  he  has 
everything  in  his  store.  If  we  are  seriously 
inclined  and  wish  to  have  something  to  think 
about  when  we  turn  from  the  book  to  the 
dinner,  he  is  full  of  the  most  serious  questions^ 
discussed  sometimes  wisely,  almost  always  by 
wise  men,  the  problems  of  morals  and  politics, 
of  religion  and  society  and  literature,  such 
questions  as  those  of  liberty  and  necessity 
in  philosophy,  liberty  and  government  in 
politics,  the  English  ChuTch  and  the  Roman, 
private  education  and  public,  life  in  the 
country  and  life  in  the  town.  Or  if  we  wish, 
not  for  problems  of  any  kind,  but  just  for  a 
picture  of  life  as  it  was  lived  a  hundred  and 
fifty  years  ago,  there  is  nothing  like  Boswell's 
pages   for   variety,    intimacy,    veracity   and. 


44    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

what  is  the  great  point  in  these  matters, 
lavishness  of  detail.  His  book  is  so^vn  with 
apparently,  but  only  apparently,  insignificant 
trifles.  What  and  how  Johnson  ate,  his 
manner  in  talking  and  walking,  the  colour  and 
shape  of  his  clothes,  the  size  of  his  stick,  all 
these  and  a  thousand  similar  details  we  know 
from  Boswell,  and  because  Boswell  had  the 
genius  to  perceive  that  they  accumulate  upon 
us  a  sensation  of  life  and  bodily  presence,  as  of 
a  man  standing  before  our  eyes. 

So,  again,  with  the  many  little  stories  he 
tells  which  no  one  else  would  have  told.  Wlio 
but  he  would  have  treasured  up  every  word  of 
that  curious  meeting  in  April  1778,  between 
Johnson  and  his  unimportant  old  friend 
Edwards,  the  man  who  said  that  he  had  tried 
to  be  a  philosopher,  but  "  cheerfulness  was 
always  breaking  in  "  ?  Yet  it  is  not  only  one 
of  the  most  Boswellian  but  one  of  the  very 
best  things  in  the  whole  book.  It  exactly 
illustrates  what  was  newest  in  his  method. 
In  an  age  of  generality  and  abstraction  he  saw 
the  advantage  of  the  concrete  and  particular, 
and  put  into  practice  the  lesson  his  master 
could  only  preach,  "  Nothing  is  too  little  for 
so  little  a  creature  as  man."  So  the  total- 
abstaining  Johnson  and  the  bibulous  Reynolds 
and  Boswell  will  each  come  before  us  exactly 
as  they  were  :  and  we  are  amused  as  we  picture 


THE   GENIUS   OF   BOSWELL       45 

the  confusion  of  Reynolds's  distinguished 
parties  where  the  servants  had  never  been 
taught  to  wait,  and  make  a  note  of  the  progress 
of  social  manners  as  we  sympathize  with  John- 
son at  Edinburgh  throwing  the  fingered  lump  of 
sugar  out  of  the  window.  Some  people,  again, 
like  Mr.  Gladstone,  are  fond  of  observing  and 
discoursing  upon  the  changes  of  taste  in  the 
matter  of  wine  :  and  such  people  will  find  in 
Boswell  almost  as  much  to  interest  their 
curiosity  as  Johnson's  own  fellowship  of  tea- 
drinkers.  The  drinker  of  champagne  wdll 
have  to  accept  the  mere  modernity  of  his 
beverage,  which  finds  no  place  in  Johnson's 
famous  hierarchy  :  "  Claret  for  boys,  port  for 
men,  brandy  for  heroes."  Or,  once  more,  if 
our  meal  ends  in  tobacco,  we  may  please 
ourselves  by  contemplating  the  alternate,  but 
never  contemporaneous,  glories  of  snuff  and 
tobacco,  and  note  the  sage's  curious,  but 
strictly  truthful,  account  of  the  advantages 
and  disadvantages  of  smoking.  "  Smoking 
has  gone  out.  To  be  sure  it  is  a  shocking 
thing,  blowing  smoke  out  of  our  mouths  into 
other  people's  mouths,  eyes,  and  noses,  and 
having  the  same  thing  done  to  us.  Yet  I 
cannot  account  why  a  thing  which  requires 
so  little  exertion  and  yet  preserves  the  mind 
from  total  vacuity  has  gone  out."  Or  if  we 
demand  a  keener  relish  for  our  meal  than  these 


46    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

quiet  joys  of  observation,  there  is  of  course 
the  whole  store  of  Johnson's  salhes  of  wit,  the 
things  we  all  quote  and  forget  and  like  to 
have  recalled  to  us. 

For  all  these  reasons  Boswell's  book,  stuffed 
full  of  matter,  and  such  matter  as  you  can 
take  up  and  lay  down  at  pleasure,  is  the  ideal 
companion  for  the  man  who  dines  or  sups 
alone.  Provided,  of  course,  that  he  has  some 
tincture  of  intellectual  tastes.  Those  whose 
curiosity  is  only  awakened  by  a  prospect  of 
the  "sporting  tips  "  \vill  not  care  for  Boswell. 
For,  though  the  book  moves  throughout  in  the 
big  world,  and  not  in  an  academic  groove, 
it  still  always  moves  intellectually.  It  asks 
a  certain  acquaintance  with  literature  and 
history  and  the  life  of  the  human  mind.  The 
talk  may,  indeed,  be  almost  said  to  deal  with 
all  subjects ;  but  it  tends  mainly  to  be  of  the 
kind  which  will  come  uppermost  when  able 
men  of  a  serious  and  bookish  turn  congregate 
together.  It  requires  leisure,  and  that  sense 
of  the  value  of  talk  which  has  grown  rarer  in 
the  hurry  of  a  generation  in  which  the  idlest 
people  affect  to  be  busy,  and  those  who  do 
nothing  at  all  are  in  a  bustle  from  morning 
till  night.  Johnson  was  never  in  a  hurry, 
especially  in  the  later  days,  when  he  had  done 
his  work  and  was  enjoying  his  fame.  IVIrs. 
Thrale    says    that    conversation    was    all    he 


THE   GENIUS   OF   BOSWELL       47 

required  to  make  liim  happy.  He  hated  people 
who  broke  it  up  to  go  to  bed  or  to  keep  an 
appointment.  Much  as  he  dehghted  in  John 
Wesley's  company,  he  complained  that  he  was 
never  at  leisure,  which,  said  Johnson,  "  is  very 
disagreeable  to  a  man  who  loves  to  fold  his 
legs  and  have  out  his  talk  as  I  do."  The  world 
has  perhaps  grown  a  more  industrious  place 
since  those  days,  though  nobody  yet  has 
managed  to  put  so  much  into  twenty-four 
hours  as  Wesley  did.  Anyhow  the  conditions 
that  made  for  such  talk  as  fills  Bos  well's 
pages  are  no  doubt  less  common  to-day  :  and 
perhaps  it  only  lingers  now  in  some  rare 
Common  Room  at  Oxford  or  Cambridge,  where 
the  evil  spirit  of  classes  and  examinations  has 
been  strictly  exorcised,  or  in  an  exceptionally 
well-chosen  party  at  an  exceptional  country 
house,  or  in  the  old  dining  societies  of  London, 
such  as  Johnson's  own,  "  The  Club,"  of  famous 
memory.  Its  modern  rarity  may,  however, 
only  make  it  the  more  precious  in  a  book, 
and  it  is  certainly  not  the  least  important 
element  in  the  popularity  of  Bos  well's 
work. 

That  work  has  always  been  praised  from 
the  day  of  its  appearance.  Lord  Thurlow, 
then  Chancellor,  ^\Tote  to  Boswell  of  the 
Tour  to  the  Hebrides,  which  is  essentially, 
though  not  formally,  its  first  instalment,  that 


48    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

he  had  read  every  word  of  it,  because  he  could 
not  help  it  :  and  added  the  flattering  question, 
'  Could  you  give  a  rule  how  to  write  a  book 
that  a  man  must  read  ?  "  Scott,  a  little  later, 
spoke  of  it  as  "  without  exception  the  best 
parlour  window  book  that  ever  was  "wi-itten." 
Six  editions  were  issued  within  twenty  years 
of  its  appearance,  a  strong  proof  of  popularity 
in  the  case  of  a  voluminous  and  expensive 
book.  And  the  praise  and  popularity  have 
gone  on  growing  ever  since.  But  the  strange 
thing  is  that  the  man  who  wrote  it  has 
commonly  been  treated  with  insult,  and  even 
with  contempt.  The  fact  is  at  first  sight  so 
inexplicable  that  it  is  worth  a  little  looking 
into.  A  man  who  has  done  us  all  such  a  service 
as  Boswell,  who  has  by  the  admission  even  of 
Macaulay  utterly  out-distanced  all  competition 
in  such  an  important  kind  of  literature  as 
biography,  would  naturally  have  been  loaded 
with  the  gratitude  and  admiration  of  posterity. 
Yet  all  fools  and  some  wise  men  have  thought 
themselves  entitled  to  throw  a  scornful  stone 
at  Boswell. 

The  truth  is  that  Boswell  was  a  man  of  very 
obvious  weaknesses,  the  weaknesses  to  which 
every  fool  feels  himself  superior,  and  of  some 
grave  vices  of  a  sort  to  which  wise  men  feel 
little  temptation.  And,  unfortunately,  he 
conquered   neither.     Rather   they  conquered 


THE   GENIUS   OF   BOSWELL       49 

him,  and  made  his  last  years  a  degradation, 
and  his  memory  one  which  his  friends  were 
glad  to  forget.  After  the  death  of  Johnson 
in  1784,  followed  in  1789  by  that  of  Mrs. 
Boswell,  whom  Johnson  once  justly  and 
generously  described  as  the  prop  and  stay  of 
her  husband's  life,  he  had  no  one  left  to  lean 
on.  And  he  was  not  a  man  strong  enough 
to  stand  alone.  But  it  is  time  to  insist  that, 
when  all  this  has  been  confessed,  we  are  very 
far  from  having  told  the  whole  truth  about 
Boswell.  The  fact  is  that  justice  will  never 
be  fully  done  to  his  memory  till  Macaulay  and 
some  others  have  been  called  up  from  their 
graves  to  do  penance  for  their  arrogant  un- 
fairness. Carlyle  did  something,  but  not 
enough;  and  he  stands  almost  alone.  Yet 
after  all,  considering  what  we  owe  Boswell, 
if  there  be  any  blindness  in  our  view  of  him, 
it  surely  ought  to  be  blindness  to  his  faults. 
We  have  heard  enough  and  to  spare  of  his 
vanity,  his  self-importance,  his  entire  lack  of 
dignity,  his  weakness  for  wine  and  worse 
things  than  wine.  But  we  have  heard  very 
httle,  far  too  little,  of  the  kindness  and 
genuineness  of  the  man's  whole  nature,  the 
warmth  of  his  friendships  and  the  enthusiastic 
loyalty  of  his  hero-worship,  of  the  reverence 
for  religion  and  the  earnest  desire  after  being 
a  better  man,  which,  though  often  defeated 


50    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

by  temptation,  were  profound  and  absolutely- 
sincere. 

The  notion  that  a  man  who  does  not 
practise  what  he  preaches  is  necessarily  in- 
sincere, always  called  forth  an  angry  protest 
from  Johnson.  "  Sir,"  he  broke  out  at 
Inverary  to  Mr.  M*Aulay,  the  historian's 
grandfather,  "  are  you  so  grossly  ignorant  of 
human  nature,  as  not  to  know  that  a  man 
may  be  very  sincere  in  good  principles  without 
having  good  practice  ?  "  No  doubt  this  was 
a  doctrine  which  Boswell  heard  gladly :  and 
Johnson  may  himself  have  been  influenced  in 
his  zeal  for  it  by  his  consciousness  that,  as 
he  said  when  enforcing  it  on  another  occasion, 
he  had  himself  preached  better  than  he  had 
practised.  "  I  have,  all  my  life  long,  been 
lying  till  noon  :  yet  I  tell  all  young  men,  and 
tell  them  with  great  sincerity,  that  nobody  who 
does  not  rise  early  will  ever  do  any  good.'* 
But,  however  that  may  be,  he  is  plainly  right 
in  the  broad  issue.  Practice  is  the  only 
absolute  proof  of  sincerity  :  but  defect  in 
practice  is  no  proof  of  insincerity.  Certainly, 
no  Christian  can  doubt  that  the  struggling, 
even  though  falling,  sinner  is  in  at  least  as 
hopeful  a  condition  as  the  complacent  person 
whose  principles  and  practice  are  fairly 
conformable  to  each  other  because  both  live 
only  the  dormant  life  of  respectability  and 


THE  GENIUS  OF  BOSWELL       51 

convention.  However,  no  one  in  his  senses 
will  try  to  make  a  hero  or  a  saint  out  of  Bos- 
well.  He  was,  as  has  been  already  said,  vain, 
a  babbler,  a  wine- bibber,  a  man  of  frequently 
irregular  and  ill-governed  life.  But  to  judge 
a  man  fairly  as  a  whole,  you  must  set  his 
achievements  against  his  failures,  and  include 
his  aspirations  as  well  as  the  weakness  which 
prevented  their  being  realized.  He  may  also 
reasonably  ask  to  be  tried  by  the  standard  of 
his  contemporaries.  If  this  larger  and  juster 
method  of  judgment  be  adopted,  the  un- 
fairness with  which  Boswell  has  been  treated 
becomes  immediately  obvious.  After  all 
vanity  is  more  a  folly  than  a  crime, 
and  pays  its  own  immediate  penalty  as  no 
other  crime  or  folly  does.  The  other  faults 
of  Boswell,  especially  drinking,  were  only  too 
common  in  a  century  at  the  beginning  of  which 
Johnson  remembered  "all  the  decent  people 
at  Lichfield  getting  drunk  every  night,"  and 
at  the  end  of  which  the  most  honoured  and 
feared  of  English  Prime  Ministers  could  appear 
intoxicated  in  the  House  of  Commons  itself. 
Drunkenness  has  not  deprived  Pitt  of  the 
gratitude  of  England,  and  we  may  well  be 
determined  that,  if  we  can  help  it,  it  shall  not 
deprive  Boswell.  It  is  not  his  vices  but  his 
virtues  that  are  notable  and  unusual.  What 
was  extraordinary  in  his  or  any  other  day  was 

D  2 


52    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS  CIRCLE 

the  generous  enthusiasm  which  made  a  young 
Scotch  laird  dehberately  determine  that  he 
would  do  something  more  with  his  life  than 
shoot  wildfowl  or  play  cards,  made  him  throw 
himself  first  with  a  curious  mixture  of  vanity 
and  genuine  devotion  to  a  noble  cause  into 
the  Corsican  struggle  for  liberty,  and  then, 
vain  of  his  birth  and  fortune  as  he  was,  place 
himself  at  the  feet,  not  of  a  duke  or  a  minister, 
but  of  a  man  of  low  origin,  rough  exterior, 
and  rougher  manners,  in  whom  he  simply 
saw  the  best  and  wisest  man  he  had  known. 
That  is  not  the  action  of  either  a  bad  man  or 
a  fool ;  and  assuredly  Boswell — in  the  essence 
of  him — was  neither  the  one  nor  the  other. 

The  truth  is  that  he  had  the  strength  and 
the  weaknesses  of  a  man  of  mobile  and  hvely 
imagination.  He  would  fancy  his  wife  and 
children  drowned  or  dead  for  no  better  reason 
than  that  he  was  not  by  them ;  he  would 
dream  of  being  a  judge  when  he  had  scarcely 
got  a  brief,  and  imagine  himself  a  minister 
when  he  had  no  prospect  of  getting  into 
Parliament.  Other  people  experience  these 
day-dreaming  vanities,  but  they  do  not  talk 
or  write  about  them.  Boswell  did ;  and  we  all 
laugh  at  him,  especially  the  fools  among  us  : 
the  wiser  part  add  some  of  the  love  that  belongs 
to  the  common  kinship  of  humanity  wherever 
it  puts  off  the  mask,  the  love  of  which  we  feel 


THE  GENIUS  OF   BOSWELL       53 

something  even  for  that  gross  old  "  bourgeois  " 
Samuel  Pepys,  just  because  he  laid  out  his 
whole  secret  self  in  black  and  white  upon  the 
paper.  Moreover,  Boswell's  absurdities  had 
their  finer  side.  The  dreamer  of  improbable 
disasters  and  impossible  good  fortunes  is  also 
the  dreamer  of  high  and  perhaps  unattainable 
ideals.  Shall  we  count  it  nothing  to  his  honour 
that,  instead  of  sitting  down  contentedly 
among  the  boon  companions  of  Ayrshire,  he 
aspired  to  read  the  best  books  in  the  world, 
to  know  the  wisest  men,  and  in  turn  to  do 
something  himself  that  should  not  be  for- 
gotten ?  And  note  that  those  aspirations 
were  in  large  part  realized.  His  intellectual 
tastes  always  remained  among  the  keenest  of 
his  pleasures  :  he  numbered  among  his  friends 
the  most  famous  writer  of  his  day,  the  greatest 
poet,  the  greatest  painter,  the  profoundest  and 
most  eloquent  of  all  English  statesmen;  and 
before  he  died  his  apparent  failure  in  personal 
achievements  was  transformed  into  the  success 
that  means  immortality  by  the  production 
of  a  book  which  after  the  lapse  of  a  century 
has  many  more  readers  than  the  works  of  his 
great  friends  whose  superiority  to  himself  he 
would  never  have  dreamed  of  challenging. 

And  what  did  these  great  men  think  of 
him  ?  Did  the  people  who  knew  him  think 
him  altogether  a  fool  ?     If  the  magistrates 


54    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

of  his  native  county  had  thought  him  merely 
that  they  would  hardly  have  chosen  him  their 
chairman.  Nor  would  the  Royal  Academy 
who  filled  their  honorary  offices  with  such 
men  as  ,  Johnso]a,__Goldsmith,  and  Gibbon, 
have  given  them  Boswell  as  a  colleague  if  they 
had  thoug^^m  aHqgethera  fool.  Reynolds, 
again,  who  was  his  friend  through  life,  and 
left  him  £200  in  his  will  to  be  expended  on  a 
picture  to  be  kept  for  his  sake,  was  not  a 
man  who  took  fools  for  his  friends.  Burke, 
who  at  first  doubted  his  fitness  for  election 
at  "  The  Club,"  became  a  great  admirer  of 
his  wonderful  good  humour,  and  received 
him  on  his  own  account  and  without  Johnson 
as  a  guest  at  Beaconsfield,  where  neither 
fools  nor  knaves  were  commonly  welcomed. 
The  whole  story  of  the  tour  to  the  Hebrides 
shows  the  regard  felt  for  him,  as  himself  and 
not  only  as  the  son  of  his  father  or  the  com- 
panion of  Johnson,  by  many  of  the  most  dis- 
tinguished and  cultivated  men  in  Scotland. 
Johnson,  the  most  veracious  of  men,  saj^s  of 
him  in  Scotland  :  "  There  is  no  house  where 
he  is  not  received  with  kindness  and  respect  " ; 
and  on  another  occasion  he  declared  that 
Boswell  "  never  left  a  house  without  leaving 
a  wish  for  his  return." 

But  the  most  complete  refutation  of  the 
worthlessness   of   Boswell    is    of   course   the 


THE   GENIUS  OF   BOSWELL       55 

friendship  and  love  he  won  from  Johnson 
himself.  Assuredly,  the  standard  of  Joluison, 
in  whose  presence  nobody  dared  to  swear  or 
talk  loosely,  was  not  a  low  one  either  morally 
or  intellectually ;  yet  we  find  him  saying  that 
he  held  Bos  well  "  in  his  heart  of  hearts  " ; 
perhaps,  indeed,  he  loved  Boswell  better  than 
any  of  his  friends.  "  My  dear  Boswell,  I 
love  you  very  much  " ;  "  My  dear  Boswell, 
your  kindness  is  one  of  the  pleasures  of  my 
life  " ;  "  Come  to  me,  my  dear  Bozzy,  and  let 
us  be  as  happy  as  we  can."  This  is  the  way 
Johnson  constantly  wrote  and  spoke  to  him. 
And  this  was  not  merely  because  Boswell  was 
"  the  best  travelling  companion  in  the  world," 
or  even  because  he  was,  what  Johnson  also 
called  him,  "  a  man  who  finds  himself  welcome 
wherever  he  goes  and  makes  new  friends  faster 
than  he  can  want  them,"  but  also  for  graver 
reasons.  Johnson  said  once  that  most  friend- 
ships were  the  result  of  caprice  or  chance, 
"mere  confederacies  in  vice  or  leagues  in 
folly,"  but  he  did  not  choose  that  his  own 
should  be  of  that  sort.  Beauclerk  is  the  only 
one  of  his  friends  who  was  not  a  man  of  high 
character.  His  feeling  for  Boswell  was  not 
a  love  of  vice  or  folly.  He  saw  Boswell  at 
his  best,  no  doubt  :  but  that  best  must  have 
had  very  real  and  positive  ^ood  qualities  in 
it  to  win  from  Johnson  such  a  remark  as  he 


56    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

makes  in  one  of  his  letters  :  "  Never,  my  dear 
sir,  do  you  take  it  into  your  head  to  think 
that  I  do  not  love  you ;  you  may  settle  your- 
self in  full  confidence  both  of  my  love  and 
my  esteem;  I  love  you  as  a  kind  man,  I 
value  you  as  a  worthy  man,  and  hope  in 
time  to  reverence  you  as  a  man  of  exemplary 
piety.  I  hold  you,  as  Hamlet  has  it,  '  in  my 
heart  of  hearts.' "  And  there  is  a  still  more 
remarkable  tribute  in  the  letter  to  John  Wesley 
giving  Boswell  an  introduction  to  him  "  be- 
cause I  think  it  very  much  to  be  %vished  that 
worthy  and  religious  men  should  be  acquainted 
with  each  other."  Nothing  can  be  more  certain 
than  that  Johnson  would  not  have  written 
so  often  in  such  language  as  this  of  a  man 
who  was  what  Macaulay  thought  Boswell  was. 
Well  may  the  foolish  editor  of  Bos  well's 
letters  to  Temple,  who  takes  Macaulay's 
view,  talk  of  the  difficulty  of  explaining  how 
it  came  about  that  Boswell  formed  one  of  a 
society  which  included  such  men  as  Johnson 
and  Burke.  The  truth  is  that  on  his  theory 
and  Macaulay's  it  is  not  explicable  at  all. 

Less  explicable  still,  on  that  view,  is  the 
admitted  excellence  of  Boswell 's  book.  Car- 
Lyle  dismissed  with  just  contempt  the  absurd 
paradox  that  the  greatness  of  the  book  was 
due  to  the  imbecility  of  the  author.  That 
is  a  theory  which  it  would  be  waste  of  time 


THE   GENIUS   OF   BOSWELL       57 

to  discuss.  But  it  may  be  worth  while  to 
point  out  that  other  and  more  rational 
explanations  of  Boswell's  success  are  also 
insufficient.  His  book  is  acknowledged  to 
have  originated  a  new  type  of  biography. 
It  was  felt  at  once,  and  has  been  increasingly 
felt  ever  since,  that  Boswell  is  so  direct  and 
personal  that  beside  him  all  other  biogi'aphers 
seem  impersonal  and  vague,  that  he  is  so 
intimate  that  he  makes  all  others  appear 
cold  and  distant,  so  lifelike  that  they  seem 
shadowy,  so  true  that  they  seem  false.  Now 
this  has  commonly  been  attributed  to  his 
habit  of  noting  down  on  the  spot  and  at 
the  moment  anything  that  struck  him  in 
Johnson's  talk  or  doings;  and  to  his  perfect 
willingness  to  exhibit  his  own  discomfitures 
so  long  as  they  served  to  honour  or  illustrate 
his  hero.  In  this  way  people  have  talked  of 
his  one  merit  being  faithfulness,  and  of  his 
work  as  a  succession  of  photographs.  Now 
it  is  true  enough  that  his  veracity  is  a  very 
great  merit,  and  that  no  one  was  ever  so 
literally  veracious  as  he.  But  no  number  of 
facts,  and  no  quintessence  of  accuracy  in  using 
them,  will  ever  make  a  great  book.  Litera- 
ture is  an  art,  and  nothing  great  in  art  has 
ever  been  done  with  facts  alone.  The  great- 
ness comes  from  the  quality  of  mind  that  is 
set  to  work  upon  the  facts.     Consequently 


58    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

the  secret  of  the  success  of  the  Life  of  Johnson 
is  to  be  found  in  the  exact  opposite  of  the 
assertion  of  Macaulay.  For  the  truth  is  that 
the  acknowledged  excellence  of  the  book  is 
in  exact  proportion  to  the  unacknowledged 
literary  gifts  of  its  author. 

The  law  for  all  works  of  art  and  literature 
is  the  same.  The  fact  is  nothing  unless  the 
artist  can  give  it  life.  Life  comes  from  human 
personality.  Ars  est  homo  additus  naturae. 
Art,  that  is,  is  nature  seen  through  a  tem- 
perament, the  facts  seen  by  a  particular  mind. 
The  landscape  into  which  the  painter  has 
put  nothing  of  his  own  personality  is  fitter 
for  a  surveyor's  office  than  for  a  picture 
gallery.  The  portrait  which  gives  nothing 
but  the  sitter's  face  is  as  dull  as  a  photograph. 
Two  portraits  of  the  same  man,  two  sketches 
of  the  same  valley,  not  only  are,  but  ought 
to  be,  quite  different  from  each  other.  Nature, 
the  facts  of  the  particular  face  or  scene, 
remain  the  same  for  both :  but  the  two  different 
artists,  each  bringing  their  own  personality, 
produce  different  results,  when  the  face  or 
scene  has  become  that  composite  mixture  of 
man  and  nature,  fact  and  mind,  which  is 
art.  And  this  is  as  true  of  all  books  which 
are  meant  to  be  literature  as  of  painting  or 
sculpture.  The  story  of  Electra  is,  broadly 
speaking,  the  same  for  Aeschylus,  Sophocles, 


THE   GENIUS   OF  BOSWELL       59 

and  Euripides  :  but  each  contributes  to  it 
liimself,  and  the  result  differs.  Virgil's  tale 
of  Troy  is  not  Homer's  :  Chaucer  gives  us 
one  Troilus  and  Cressida,  and  Shakespeare 
another  :  the  fable  of  the  Fox  and  the  Goat 
takes  prose  from  Pheedrus  and  poetry  from 
La  Fontaine.  So  Pope's  Homer  is  not  Homer, 
the  thing  in  itself,  the  unrelated,  absolute 
Homer,  but  Poye  additus  Homero  ;  and  it  is 
not  Euripides  pure  and  simple  which  is  the 
true  account  of  certain  beautiful  modern 
versions  of  Euripides,  but  Euripidi  additus 
Murray. 

It  may  be  objected  that  these  are  all 
instances  from  poetry,  where  the  truth  aimed 
at  is  rather  general  than  particular.  And 
this  distinction  is  a  real  one.  The  truth  of 
the  Aeneid  is  its  truth  to  human  life  as  a 
whole,  not  its  accuracy  in  reporting  the  words 
used  on  particular  occasions  by  Dido  and 
Turnus,  neither  of  whom  may  have  ever 
existed.  History  and  biography  are,  un- 
doubtedly, on  a  different  footing  in  this 
respect,  just  as  the  artist  who  calls  his  picture 
*'  Arundel  Castle  "  or  "  Windermere  "  is  not 
in  the  same  position  of  freedom  as  the  painter 
of  an  "  Evening  on  the  Downs."  But  the 
law  of  homo  additus  naturae  still  remains 
true  in  this  case  as  in  the  other,  though  its 
application  is  modified.     It  is  true  that  a 


60    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

man  who  pretends  to  give  a  representation 
of  Arundel  is  not  justified  in  adding  to  it  a 
tower  800  feet  high  just  because  he  happens 
himself  to  have  a  fancy  for  towers.  But 
what  he  has  to  add,  if  his  work  is  to  be  art 
at  all,  is  the  emotional  mood,  the  exaltation, 
depression,  excitement,  or  whatever  it  may 
be,  which  Arundel  stirred  in  him,  and  by 
means  of  which  he  and  the  scene  before  him 
were  melted  into  that  unity  of  intensified 
life  which  is  born  of  the  marriage  of  nature 
and  man  and  is  what  we  call  art.  The  next 
day  another  man  takes  his  place,  and  the 
result,  though  still  Arundel  Castle,  is  an  en- 
tirely different  picture.  So  in  the  case  of 
books.  The  same  Socrates  is  seen  in  one 
way  when  we  get  that  part  of  him  which 
could  unite  with  the  personality  of  Xenophon, 
and  in  quite  another  when  the  union  is  with 
Plato.  The  English  Civil  War  marries  one 
side  of  itself  to  Clarendon,  and  another  to 
Milton;  and  both  have  that  relative  truth 
which  is  all  art  wishes  for,  and  which  is  indeed 
a  greater  thing,  as  having  human  life  in  it, 
than  any  absolute  truth  in  itself  which,  if 
it  were  discoverable,  would  be  pure  science, 
as  useful  perhaps,  but  as  dead,  as  the  First 
Proposition  of  Euclid.  The  greatness  of 
literature  depends  on  the  degree  in  which 
the  dead   matter  of  fact   belonging  to  the 


THE  GENIUS   OF  BOSWELL       61 

subject  has  been  quickened  into  life  by  the 
emotional,  intellectual  and  imaginative  power 
of  the  writer.  And  this  is  true  of  historical 
and  biographical  work  as  well  as  of  poetry. 

That  is  the  point  to  be  remembered  about 
Bos  well,  and  to  be  set  against  his  detractors. 
His  book  is  admittedlj^  one  of  the  most  living 
books  in  existence.  That  life  can  have  come 
from  no  one  but  the  author.  It  is  the 
irrefutable  proof  of  his  genius.  Life  and 
power  do  not  issue,  here  any  more  than  else- 
where, out  of  folly  and  nonentity.  The  Life 
of  Johnson  is  the  result  of  the  most  intimate 
and  fertile  union  between  biographer  and  his 
subject  which  has  ever  occurred,  and  it  gives 
us  in  consequence  more  of  the  essence  of  both 
than  any  other  biography.  Boswell  brought 
to  it  his  own  bustling  activity  and  curiosity 
from  which  it  draws  its  vividness  and  variety  : 
he  brought  to  it  also  his  warm-hearted,  half- 
morbid  emotionalism  from  which  it  derives 
its  many  moving  pages  :  he  brought  to  it  his 
reverence  for  Johnson,  which  enabled  him 
to  exhibit,  as  no  other  man  could,  that  king- 
ship and  priesthood  which  was  a  real  part, 
though  not  the  whole,  of  Johnson's  relation 
to  his  circle.  We  see  Johnson  in  his  pages 
as  the  guide,  philosopher  and  friend  of  all 
who  came  in  his  way,  the  intellectual  and 
spiritual  father  of  Boswell,  the  master  of  his 


G2    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

studies,  the  director  of  his  conscience.  No- 
body else  in  that  company  saw  as  much  of 
the  true  and  great  Johnson  as  Bos  well's  lov- 
ing devotion  enabled  him  to  see;  and  when 
he  came  to  write  the  life  he  put  himself  into 
it,  with  the  result  that  the  portrait  of  Johnson 
as  posterity  sees  it,  will  never  lose  the  halo 
of  glory  with  which  the  Boswellian  hero- 
worship  crowned  it  for  all  time. 

This  was  the  all-important  homo  additus 
naturae  part  of  Boswell's  work :  the  setting 
his  subject  in  the  light  of  his  own  imaginative 
and  emotional  insight.  But  there  was  more 
than  that.  Boswell  had  not  only  the  tem- 
perament of  the  artist  :  he  had  an  artist's 
craftsmanship.  The  Lije  makes  four  large 
octavo  volumes,  each  of  some  500  pages,  in 
the  great  Oxford  Edition  by  Birkbeck  Hill  : 
and  the  Tour  to  the  Hebrides  makes  a  fifth. 
That  is  a  big  book  :  yet  so  perfect  an  artist 
is  Boswell,  that  scarcely  once  for  a  single 
page  in  all  the  five  volumes  is  the  chief  light 
turned  in  any  direction  except  that  of  John- 
son. Anybody  who  has  even  read,  much  more 
anybody  who  has  written,  a  book  of  any  length 
knows  how  difficult  and  rare  an  achievement 
it  is  to  maintain  perfect  unity  of  subject, 
never  to  lose  the  sense  of  proportion,  never 
to  let  side  issues  and  secondary  personages 
obstruct  or  conceal  the  main  business  in  hand. 


THE   GENIUS   OF  BOSWELL       63 

There  is  nothing  of  the  kind  in  Bos  well. 
Under  his  hand  no  episode  is  ever  allowed  to 
be  more  than  an  episode,  no  minor  character 
ever  occupies  the  centre  of  the  stage.  Who- 
ever and  whatever  is  mentioned  is  mentioned 
only  in  relation  to  Johnson.  Many  great 
men,  greater  some  of  them  than  his  hero, 
are  brought  into  his  picture,  but  it  is  never 
upon  them  that  the  chief  light  is  thrown. 
All  the  other  figures,  whoever  they  are,  are 
here  but  attendants  upon  Johnson's  greatness, 
foils  to  his  wit,  witnesses  to  his  virtues,  his 
friends  or  his  foes,  the  subjects  or  victims  of 
his  talk,  anything  that  you  will  in  connection 
with  him,  but  apart  from  him — nothing.  All 
that  they  say  or  do  or  suffer,  is  told  us  only 
to  set  Johnson  in  a  clearer  light.  The  unity 
of  the  picture  is  never  broken.  And  that 
is  the  same  thing  as  saying  that  Boswell  is 
not  merely  what  every  one  has  seen,  a  unique 
collector  of  material  :  he  is  also  what  so  few 
have  seen,  an  artist  of  the  very  highest  rank. 
This  is  seen,  too,  in  another  important 
point.  The  danger  of  the  hero-worshipping 
biographer  is  only  too  familiar  to  us.  His 
book  is  usually  a  monotonous  and  insipid 
record  of  virtue  or  wisdom.  The  hero  is 
always  right,  and  always  victorious,  with  the 
result  that  the  book  is  at  once  tedious  and 
incredible.     But   Boswell   knew   better  than 


64    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

that.  He  was  too  much  of  an  artist  not  to 
know  that  he  wanted  shadows  to  give  value 
to  his  Hghts,  and  too  much  a  lover  of  the 
fullness  and  variety  of  life  not  to  want  to 
get  all  of  it  that  he  possibly  could  into  his 
picture.  Like  all  great  writers,  there  was 
scarcely  anything  he  was  afraid  of  handling, 
because  there  was  scarcely  anything  of  which 
he  was  not  conscious  that  he  could  bend  it 
to  his  will  and  force  it  to  take  its  place,  and 
no  more  than  its  place,  in  his  scheme.  Con- 
sequently, he  has  the  courage  to  show  us  his 
hero,  now  wrong-headed  and  perverse,  now 
rude  almost  to  brutality,  now  so  weak  that 
the  same  resolution  is  repeated  year  after 
year  only  to  be  again  broken  and  again 
renewed,  now  so  gross  and  almost  repulsive 
in  Ms  appearance  and  habits  that  it  requires 
all  his  greatness  to  explain  the  welcome  which 
well-bred  men  and  refined  women  everywhere 
gave  him.  Nothing  better  shows  the  great- 
ness of  Bos  well.  He  was  not  afraid  to  paint 
the  wart  on  his  Cromwell's  nose,  because  he 
knew  that  he  could  so  give  the  nobleness  of 
the  whole  face,  that  the  wart  would  merely 
add  to  the  truthfulness  of  the  portrait  without 
detracting  from  its  nobleness.  The  vast 
quantity  of  material  which  he  brought  into 
his  book  and  the  complete  mastery  which 
he  maintained  over  it,  is  shown  by  the  fact 


THE  GENIUS  OF  BOSWELL       65 

that  few  or  no  biographies  record  so  many 
ridiculous  or  discreditable  circumstances  about 
their  hero,  and  yet  none  leaves  a  more  con- 
vincing impression  of  his  greatness. 

The  notion,  then,  that  the  man  who  wrote 
the  Life  of  Johnson  was  a  fool,  is  an  absurdity. 
If  the  arguments  in  its  favour  prove  anybody 
a  fool  it  is  not  Bos  well.  Nor  is  it  even  true 
that  Boswell,  like  some  great  artists,  escaped 
apparently  by  some  divine  gift  from  his 
natural  folly  just  during  the  time  necessary 
for  the  production  of  his  great  work,  but  at 
all  other  times  relapsed  at  once  into  imbecility. 
We  know  how  scrupulously  accurate  he  was 
in  what  he  wrote,  not  only  from  his  candour 
in  relating  his  own  defeats,  but  from  the  many 
cases  in  which  he  confesses  that  he  was  not 
quite  sure  of  the  exact  facts,  such  as,  to  give 
one  instance,  whether  Johnson,  on  a  certain 
occasion,  spoke  of  "  a  page  "  or  "  ten  lines  '* 
of  Pope  as  not  containing  so  much  sense  as 
one  line  of  Cowley.  Therefore  we  may  take 
the  picture  he  gives  of  himself  in  his  book  as 
a  fair  one.  And  what  is  it  ?  Does  it  bear 
out  the  notorious  assertion  that  "  there  is  not 
in  all  his  books  a  single  remark  of  his  own  on 
literature,  politics,  religion  or  society  which 
is  not  either  commonplace  or  absurd  "  ?  One 
would  sometimes  imagine  Macaulay  had  never 
read  the  book  of  which  he  speaks  with  such 


66    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLF 

confident  decision.  Certainly,  except  as  a 
biographer,  Boswell  was  not  a  man  of  any 
very  remarkable  abilities.  But,  in  answer 
to  such  an  insult  as  Macaulay's,  Boswell's 
defenders  may  safely  appeal  to  the  book  itself, 
and  to  everybody  who  has  read  it  with  any 
care.  Will  any  one  deny  that  not  once  or 
twice,  but  again  and  again,  the  plain  sense 
of  some  subject  which  had  been  distorted 
or  confused  by  the  perverse  ingenuity  of 
Johnson  "  talking  for  victory  "  comes  quietly, 
after  the  smoke  has  cleared  away,  from  the 
despised  imbecility  of  Boswell  ?  Who  gives 
the  judgment  which  every  one  would  now 
give  about  the  contest  with  the  American 
colonies  ?  Not  Johnson  but  Boswell ;  not 
the  author  of  Taxation  No  Tyranny,  but  the 
man  who  wrote  so  early  as  1775  to  his  friend 
Temple  :  "  I  am  grooving  more  and  more  an 
American.  I  see  the  unreasonableness  of 
taxing  them  without  the  consent  of  their 
Assemblies ;  I  think  our  Ministry  are  mad  in 
undertaking  this  desperate  war."  Who  was 
right  and  who  was  wrong  on  the  question  of 
the  Middlesex  Election  ?  Nobody  now  doubts 
that  Boswell  was  right,  and  Johnson  was 
wrong.  Which  has  proved  wiser,  as  we  look 
back,  Johnson  who  ridiculed  Gray's  poetry, 
or  Boswell  who  sat  up  all  night  reading  it  ? 
The  fact  is  that  Boswell  was  undoubtedly  a 


THE  GENIUS  OF  BOSWELL       67 

sensible  and  cultivated  as  well  as  a  very 
agreeable  man,  and  as  such  was  warmly 
welcomed  at  the  houses  of  the  most  intelligent 
men  of  his  day. 

The  old  estimate,  then,  of  James  Boswell 
must  be  definitely  abandoned.  The  man  who 
knew  him  best,  his  friend  Temple,  the  friend 
of  Gray,  said  of  him  that  he  was  "  the  most 
thinking  man  he  had  ever  known  "  We  may 
not  feel  able  to  regard  that  as  anything  more 
than  the  judgment  of  friendship  :  but  it  is 
not  fools  who  win  such  judgments  even  from 
their  friends.  We  may  wonder  at  the  word 
*'  genius  "  being  applied  to  him ;  and  if  genius 
be  taken  in  the  stricter  modern  sense  of 
transcendent  powers  of  mind,  the  sense  in 
which  it  is  applied  to  Milton  or  Michael 
Angelo,  there  is  of  course  no  doubt  that  it 
would  be  absurd  to  apply  it  to  Boswell.  But 
if  the  word  be  used  in  the  old  looser  sense, 
or  if  it  be  given  the  definite  meaning  of  a  man 
who  originates  an  important  new  departure 
in  a  serious  sphere  of  human  action,  who 
creates  something  of  a  new  order  in  art  or 
literature  or  politics  or  war,  then  Boswell 's 
claim  to  genius  cannot  be  questioned.  Just 
as  another  member  of  Johnson's  *'  Club  "  was 
in  those  years  writing  history  as  it  had  never 
been  written  before,  so,  and  to  a  far  more 
remarkable     degree,     Boswell     was     writing 

E  2 


68    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

biography  as  it  had  never  been  written  before. 
Gibbon's  Decline  and  Fall  was  in  fact  a  far 
less  original  ^rformance,  far  Jess__flf  a  new 
departure,  tliaja_^os w^ll^s~^^_o^ 
Boswell's  book  is  in  truth  what  he  himself 
called  it,  "  more  of  a  life  than  any  work  that 
has  ever  yet  appeared."  After  it  the  art 
of  biography  could  never  be  merely  what  it 
had  been  before.  And  in  that  sense,  the 
sense  of  a  man  whose  work  is  an  advance  upon 
that  of  his  predecessors,  not  merely  in  degree, 
but  in  kind,  Bojs.welJ-  was,  undoubtedJy  and 
even  more„than  Gibbon,  entitled  to  the  praise 
of  genius. 

Let  us  all,  then,  unashamedly  and  ungrudg- 
ingly give  the  rein  to  our  admiration  and  love 
of  Bos  well.  There  is  a  hundred  years  between 
us  and  his  follies,  and  every  one  of  the  hundred 
is  full  of  his  claim  upon  our  gratitude.  Let 
us  now  be  ready  to  pay  the  debt  in  full. 
Let  us  be  sure  that  there  is  something  more 
than  mere  interest  or  entertainment  in  a  book 
which  so  wise  a  man  as  Jowett  confessed  to 
having  read  fifty  times,  of  which  another 
lifelong  thinker  about  life,  a  man  very 
different  from  Jowett,  Robert  Louis  Steven- 
son, could  write  :  "lam  taking  a  little  Bos  well 
daily  by  way  of  a  Bible ;  I  mean  to  read  him 
now  until  the  day  I  die."  And  not  only  in 
the  book  but  in  the  author  too.     Let  us  be 


THE   GENIUS  OF  BOSWELL       69 

sure  with  Carlyle  that  if  "  Boswell  wrote  a 
good  book  "  it  was  not  because  he  was  a  fool, 
but  on  the  contrary  "  because  he  had  a  heart 
and  an  eye  to  discern  Wisdom,  and  an  utter- 
ance to  render  it  forth  :  because  of  his  free 
insight,  of  his  hvely  talent,  above  all  of  his 
love  and  childlike  open-mindedness."  In  the 
particular  business  he  had  to  carry  through, 
these  qualities  were  an  equipment  amounting 
to  a  modest  kind  of  genius.  They  enabled 
him  to  produce  a  book  which  has  given  as 
much  pleasure  perhaps  to  intelligent  men 
as  any  book  that  ever  was  written.  Let  us 
be  careful  whenever  we  think  of  Boswell  to 
remember  this  side,  the  positive,  creative, 
permanent  side  of  him  :  and  not  so  careful  as 
our  grandfathers  generally  were,  to  remember 
the  other  side  which  ceased  to  have  any  further 
importance  on  that  night  in  May  1795  when 
he  ended  the  fifty-five  years  of  a  life  in  which 
he  had  found  time  for  more  follies  than  most 
men,  for  more  vices  perhaps,  certainly  for 
more  wisdom,  but  also  for  what  most  men 
never  so  much  as  conceive,  the  preparation 
and  production  of  a  masterpiece* 


70    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS  CIRCLE 
CHAPTER  III 

THE   LIVES   OF   BOSWELL   AND  JOHNSON 

These  two  men,  then,  are  for  ever  insepar- 
able. They  go  down  the  centuries  together, 
Johnson  owing  most  of  his  immortahty 
to  the  genius  of  Bos  well,  Bo  swell  owing  to 
Johnson  that  inspiring  opportunity  without 
which  genius  cannot  discover  that  it  is  genius. 
There  were  other  men  in  Johnson's  circle, 
whom  he  knew  longer  and  respected  more : 
but  for  us.  Bos  well's  position  in  relation  to 
Johnson  is  unique.  Beside  him  the  others, 
even  Burke  and  Re>Tiolds,  are,  in  this  con- 
nection, shadows.  They  had  their  independ- 
ent fields  of  greatness  in  which  Johnson  had 
no  share  :  Bos  well's  greatness  is  all  John- 
sonian. We  cannot  think  of  him  apart  from 
Johnson  :  and  he  has  so  managed  that  we 
can  scarcely  think  of  Johnson  apart  from 
him.  No  one  who  occupies  himself  with  the 
one  can  ignore  the  other  :  in  interest  and 
popularity  they  stand  or  fall  together.  It 
may  be  well,  therefore,  before  going  further, 
to  give  the  bare  facts  of  both  their  lives; 
dismissing  Boswell  first,  as  the  less  important, 
and  then  devoting  the  rest  of  the  chapter  to 
Johnson. 


BOSWELL  AND  JOHNSON         71 

James  Boswell  was  born  in  1740.  He  came 
of  an  ancient  family,  a  fact  he  never  forgot, 
as,  indeed,  few  people  do  who  have  the  same 
advantage.  His  father  was  a  Scottish  judge 
with  the  title  of  Lord  Auchinleck.  The  fkst 
of  the  family  to  hold  the  estate  of  Auchinleck, 
which  is  in  Ayrshire,  was  Thomas  Boswell, 
who  received  a  grant  of  it  from  James  IV  in 
whose  army  he  went  to  Flodden  and  shared 
the  defeat  and  death  of  his  patron.  The 
estate  had  therefore  belonged  to  the  Boswells 
over  two  hundred  years  when  the  future 
biographer  of  Johnson  was  born.  His  father 
and  he  were  never  congenial  spirits.  The 
judge  was  a  Whig  with  a  practical  view  of 
life  and  had  no  sympathy  with  his  son's 
romantic  propensities  either  in  religion, 
politics  or  literature.  A  plain  Lowland  Scot, 
he  did  not  see  why  his  son  should  take  up 
with  Toryism,  Anglicanism,  or  literary  hero- 
worship.  When  James,  after  first  attaching 
himself  to  Paoli,  the  leader  of  the  Corsican 
struggle  for  independence,  returned  home  and 
took  up  the  discipleship  to  Johnson  which 
was  to  be  the  central  fact  in  the  rest  of  his 
life,  his  father  frankly  despaired  of  him,  and 
broke  out,  according  to  Walter  Scott :  "  There's 
nae  hope  for  Jamie,  mon.  Jamie  is  gaen 
clean  gyte.  What  do  you  think,  mon  ?  He's 
done   wi'   Paoli — he's   off  wi'  the   landloup- 


72    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

ing  scoundrel  of  a  Corsican;  and  whose 
tail  do  you  think  he  has  pinned  himself 
to  now,  mon  ?  A  dominie,  mon — an  auld 
dominie  :  he  keeped  a  schule,  and  cau'd  it  an 
acaadamy."  Well  might  Bos  well  say  that 
they  were  "  so  totally  different  that  a  good 
understanding  is  scarcely  possible.'*  Beside 
disliking  Paoli  and  Johnson,  Lord  Auchinleck 
eared  nothing  for  some  of  Boswell's  strict 
feudal  notions,  had  the  bad  taste  to  give  his 
son  a  step-mother,  and  to  be  as  unlike  him  as 
possible  in  the  matter  of  good  spirits.  Scarcely 
anything  could  interfere  with  the  judge's 
cheerfulness,  while  Boswell  was  always  falling 
into  depressions  about  nothing  in  particular 
and  perhaps  indulging  in  the  "  foolish  notion," 
rebuked  by  Johnson,  that  "  melancholy  is  a 
proof  of  acuteness."  But  in  spite  of  their 
differences  the  father  and  son  managed  to 
avoid  anything  like  a  definite  breach.  Boswell 
was  sincerely  anxious  to  please  his  father,  and 
was  constantly  urged  in  that  direction  by  his 
great  mentor  :  and  after  all  the  judge  went 
some  way  to  meet  his  singular  son,  for  he  paid 
his  debts  and  entertained  both  Paoli  and 
Johnson  at  Auchinleck.  The  latter  visit  was 
naturally  a  source  of  some  anxiety  to  Boswell 
and  it  did  not  go  off  without  a  storm  when  the 
old  Whig  and  the  old  Tory  unluckily  got  on  to 
the  topic  of  Charles  I  and  Cromwell :   but  all 


BOSWELL  AND   JOHNSON         73 

ended  well,  and  Boswell  characteristically 
ends  his  story  of  it,  written  after  both  were 
dead,  with  the  pious  hope  that  the  antagonists 
had  by  then  met  in  a  higher  state  of  existence 
"  where  there  is  no  room  for  Whiggism." 

Full  of  activities  as  Boswell's  life  was,  the 
definite  facts  and  dates  in  it  are  not  very 
numerous.  He  was  sent  to  Glasgow  Univer- 
sity, and  wished  to  be  a  soldier,  but  was  bred 
by  his  father  to  the  law.  No  doubt  he  gave 
some  early  signs  of  intellectual  promise,  for 
which  it  was  not  thought  the  army  provided 
a  fit  sphere,  for  the  Duke  of  Argyle  is  re- 
ported to  have  said  to  his  father  when  he  was 
only  twenty :  "  My  lord,  I  like  your  son  : 
this  boy  must  not  be  shot  at  for  three-and- 
sixpence  a  day."  He  paid  his  first  visit  to 
London  in  1760;  and,  having  heard  a  good 
deal  about  Johnson  from  one  Mr.  Gentleman, 
and  from  Derrick,  a  very  minor  poet,  he  at 
once  sought  an  introduction,  but  had  to  leave 
London  without  succeeding  in  his  object.  He 
was  equally  unsuccessful  when  he  was  in 
London  the  next  year,  during  which  he 
published  some  anonymous  poems  which 
would  not  have  helped  him  to  secure  the  de- 
sired introduction.  The  great  event  occurred 
at  last  in  1763.  The  day  was  the  16th  of 
May  and  the  scene  the  house  of  Davies,  the 
bookseller.     "At  last,"    says  Boswell,   "on 


74    DR,   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

Monday  the  16th  of  May,  when  I  was  sitting 
in  Mr.  Davies's  back-parlour,  after  having 
drunk  tea  with  him  and  Mrs.  Davies,  John- 
son unexpectedly  came  into  the  shop  ;  and 
Mr.  Davies  having  perceived  him  through  the 
glass-door  in  the  room  in  which  we  were 
sitting,  advancing  towards  us, — he  announced 
his  aweful  approach  to  me,  somewhat  in  the 
manner  of  an  actor  in  the  part  of  Horatio, 
when  he  addresses  Hamlet  on  the  appearance 
of  his  father's  ghost,  'Look,  my  Lord,  it 
comes.'  " 

So,  with  characteristic  accuracy  and  char- 
acteristic imagination,  begins  his  well-known 
account  of  his  first  meeting  with  his  hero, 
and  the  storms  to  which  he  was  exposed 
in  its  course.  But  all  ended  satisfactorily, 
for  when  the  great  man  was  gone,  Davies 
reassured  the  nervous  Boswell  by  saying: 
"Don't  be  uneasy,  I  can  see  he  likes  you 
very  well."  A  few  days  afterwards  Boswell 
called  on  Johnson  at  his  Chambers  in  the 
Temple,  and  the  great  friendship  which  was 
the  pleasure  and  business  of  his  life  was  defi- 
nitely begun.  Yet  it  is  worth  remembering, 
if  only  as  an  additional  proof  of  Bos  well's 
biographical  genius,  that,  according  to  the 
calculation  of  Dr.  Birkbeck  Hill,  when  all 
the  weeks  and  months  during  which  Johnson 
and  Boswell  were  living  within  reach  of  each 


BOSWELL  AND   JOHNSON         75 

other  are  added  together,  they  amount  to  Httle 
more  than  two  years.  And  of  course  this 
includes  all  the  days  on  which  they  were  both 
in  London,  on  many,  or  rather  most,  of  which 
they  did  not  meet. 

A  few  months  after  the  fu-st  meeting, 
Boswell  went  by  his  father's  wish  to  Utrecht 
to  study  law.  But  before  that  the  friendship 
was  got  on  to  a  firm  footing,  and  Boswell  had 
had  the  pride  and  pleasure  of  hearing  Johnson 
say,  "  There  are  few  people  whom  I  take  so 
much  to,  as  you."  A  still  stronger  proof  of 
Johnson's  feeling  was  that  he  insisted  on  going 
with  Boswell  to  Harwich  to  see  him  out  of 
England.  This  was  the  occasion  on  which  he 
scarified  the  good  Protestants  who  were  with 
them  in  the  coach  by  defending  the  Inquisi- 
tion, and  invited  one  of  the  ladies  who  said 
she  never  allowed  her  children  to  be  idle  to 
take  his  own  education  in  hand ;  *"  for  I  have 
been  an  idle  fellow  all  my  life.'  '  I  am  sure, 
sir,'  said  she,  'you  have  not  been  idle.' 
'  Nay,  madam,  it  is  very  true,  and  that 
gentleman  there,'  pointing  to  me,  'has  been 
idle.  He  was  idle  at  Edinburgh.  His  father 
sent  him  to  Glasgow  where  he  continued  to 
be  idle.  He  then  came  to  London  where  he 
has  been  very  idle;  and  now  he  is  going  to 
Utrecht  where  he  will  be  as  idle  as  ever.'  I 
asked  him  privately  how  he  could  expose  me 


76    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

so.  '  Pooh,  Pooh  ! '  said  he,  '  they  know 
nothing  about  you  and  will  think  of  it  no 
more.'  "  When  he  was  not  engaged  in  these 
alarums  and  excursions  or  in  reproving 
Boswell  for  giving  the  coachman  a  shilling 
instead  of  the  customary  sixpence,  he  was 
occupied  in  reading  Pomponius  Mela  De  Situ 
Orbis.  How  complete  the  picture  is  and  how 
vivid  !  It  once  more  gives  Boswell's  method 
in  miniature. 

He  seems  to  have  stayed  at  Utrecht  about 
a  year,  afterwards  travelling  in  Germany, 
where  he  visited  Wittenberg,  and  sat  down  to 
write  to  Johnson  in  the  church  where  the 
Reformation  was  first  preached,  with  his  paper 
resting  on  the  tomb  of  Melanchthon.  It  is 
noticeable  that,  though  he  had  only  known 
Johnson  a  year,  he  already  hoped  to  be  his 
biographer.  "  At  this  tomb,  then,  my  ever 
dear  and  respected  friend,  I  vow  to  thee  an 
eternal  attachment.  It  shall  be  my  study 
to  do  what  I  can  to  render  your  life  happy  : 
and,  if  you  die  before  me,  I  shall  endeavour 
to  do  honour  to  your  memory."  He  was  also 
at  this  time  in  Italy  and  Switzerland,  where 
he  visited  Voltaire  and  gratified  him  by 
quoting  a  remark  of  Johnson's  that  Frederick 
the  Great's  writings  were  the  sort  of  stuff  one 
might  expect  from  "  a  footboy  who  had  been 
Voltaire's   amanuensis."     Nor   did   this   col- 


BOSWELL  AND   JOHNSON         77 

lector  of  celebrities  omit  to  visit  Rousseau, 
the  rival  lion  of  the  day,  between  whom  and 
Voltaire  the  orthodox  Johnson  thought  it  was 
"  difficult  to  settle  the  proportion  of  iniquity." 
But  as  far  as  Bos  well's  records  go,  he  never 
said  such  violent  things  of  Voltaire  as  of 
Rousseau,  whom  he  caUed  "  a  rascal  who 
ought  to  be  hunted  out  of  society  and  trans- 
ported to  work  in  the  plantations."  Boswell, 
however,  was  an  admirer  of  the  Vicaire  Sa- 
voyard, and  said  what  he  could  in  defence  of 
his  host,  in  return  for  the  hospitality  he  had 
enjoyed  at  Neuchatel,  with  the  usual  result, 
of  course,  that  Johnson  only  became  more 
outrageous. 

In  1765  Boswell  made  the  acquaintance  of 
another  distinguished  man  with  whom  his 
name  will  always  be  connected.  Corsica  had 
at  that  time  been  long,  and  on  the  whole 
victoriously,  engaged  in  a  struggle  to  free 
itself  from  the  hated  rule  of  Genoa.  The 
leader  of  the  Corsicans  was  a  man  of  high 
birth,  character  and  abilities,  Pascal  Paoli, 
who  had  acted  since  1753  at  once  as  their 
General  and  as  the  head  of  the  civil  adminis- 
tration. Both  the  generous  and  the  curious 
element  in  Boswell  made  him  anxious  not  to 
return  from  Italy  without  seeing  something 
of  so  interesting  a  people  and  so  great  a  hero. 
Armed    with    introductions    from    Rousseau 


78    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

and  others  and  with  such  protection  as  a 
British  Captain's  letter  could  give  him  against 
Barbary  Corsairs,  he  sailed  from  Leghorn  to 
Corsica  in  September  1765.  His  account  of 
the  island  and  of  his  tour  there,  published  in 
1768,  is  still  very  good  reading.  He  soon 
made  his  way  to  the  palace  where  Paoli  was 
residing,  with  whom  he  at  fu'st  felt  himself  in 
a  presence  more  awe-inspiring  than  that  of 
princes,  but  ventured  after  a  while  upon  a 
compliment  to  the  Corsicans.  "  Sir,  I  am 
upon  my  travels,  and  have  lately  visited 
Rome.  I  am  come  from  seeing  the  ruins  of 
one  brave  and  free  people  :  I  now  see  the  rise 
of  another."  The  good  sense  of  Paoli  declined 
any  parallel  between  Rome  and  his  own  little 
people,  but  he  soon  received  Boswell  into  his 
intimacy  and  spent  some  hours  alone  with 
him  almost  every  day.  One  fine  answer  of 
his,  uniting  the  scholar  and  the  patriot,  is 
worth  quoting.  Boswell  asked  him  how  he, 
who  confessed  to  his  love  of  society  and 
particularly  of  the  society  of  learned  and 
cultivated  men,  could  be  content  to  pass  his 
life  in  an  island  where  no  such  advantages 
were  to  be  had;  to  which  Paoli  replied  at 
once — 

"Vincit  amor  patriae  laudumque  immensa 
cupido." 


BOSWELL  AND   JOHNSON         79 

Well  might  Boswell  wish  to  have  a  statue 
of  him  taken  at  that  moment.  Even  Virgilian 
quotation  has  seldom  been  put  to  nobler  use. 
Like  all  the  great  men  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  Paoli  was  an  enthusiast  for  the 
ancients.  "  A  young  man  who  would  form 
his  mind  to  glory,"  he  told  Boswell,  "  must 
not  read  modern  memoirs ;  ma  Plutarcho,  ma 
Tito  Livio.""  His  own  mind  was  formed  not 
only  to  glory,  but  also  to  what  so  often  fails 
to  go  with  glory,  to  justice  and  moderation. 
Nothing  is  more  remarkable  in  the  conversa- 
tions with  him  recorded  by  Boswell  than  his 
good  sense  and  fairness  of  mind  in  speaking 
of  the  Genoese.  Even  in  the  excitement  of 
Corsica,  Boswell  did  not  forget  Johnson.  He 
says  that  he  quoted  specimens  of  Johnson's 
wisdom  to  Paoli,  who  "  translated  them  to  the 
Corsican  heroes  with  Italian  energy  " ;  and, 
as  he  had  written  to  his  master  "  from  the 
tomb  of  Melanchthon  sacred  to  learning  and 
piety,"  so  he  also  wrote  to  him  "  from  the 
palace  of  Pascal  Paoli  sacred  to  wisdom  and 
liberty."  Boswell  was  received  with  great 
honour  in  Corsica,  no  doubt  partly  because 
he  was  very  naturally  supposed  to  have  some 
mission  from  the  British  Government.  He 
left  the  island  in  December  and  arrived  in 
London  in  February  1766,  when  his  intimacy 
with  Johnson  was  at  once  resumed,  in  spite 


80    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

of  the  visits  to  Rousseau  and  Voltaire  which 
drew  some  inevitable  sarcasms  from  the  great 
man.  He  soon,  however,  returned  to  Scot- 
land, where  he  was  admitted  an  Advocate  in 
the  summer  of  1766. 

Johnson  thought  he  was  too  busy  about 
Corsica,  and  wrote  to  him  :  "  Empty  your 
head  of  Corsica,  which  I  think  has  filled  it 
rather  too  long."  But  this  was  in  March 
1768,  when  Boswell's  Account  of  Corsica  had 
already  been  published.  It  sold  very  well, 
a  second  and  a  third  edition  appearing  within 
the  year.  Gray  and  other  good  judges  spoke 
warmly  of  it  and  it  seems  that  a  French 
translation  as  well  as  two  Dutch  ones  were 
made.  It  caused  so  much  stir  and  aroused  so 
much  sympathy  in  England  that  Lord  Holland 
was  quite  afraid  we  were  going  to  be  "  so 
foolish  as  to  go  to  war  because  Mr.  Boswell 
has  been  in  Corsica."  After  this  it  was  less 
likely  than  ever  that  Boswell  would  forget 
that  island.  Motives  of  vanity  combined  with 
his  genuine  enthusiasm  to  keep  him  full  of  it, 
and  he  replied  to  Johnson's  monition : 
•'  Empty  my  head  of  Corsica  !  empty  it  of 
honour,  empty  it  of  humanity,  empty  it  of 
friendship,  empty  it  of  piety  !  No  !  while 
I  live,  Corsica  and  the  cause  of  the  brave 
islanders  shall  ever  employ  much  of  my 
attention  and   interest   me  in  the   sincerest 


BOSWELL  AND   JOHNSON         81 

manner."  It  seems  from  his  letters  to  Temple 
that  he  found  these  outbursts  a  great  deal 
easier  than  living  in  a  manner  worthy  of  a 
friend  of  Paoli.  But  he  did  more  than  talk. 
He  wrote  to  Chatham  to  try  to  interest  him 
in  Corsica,  and  received  a  reply  three  pages 
long  applauding  his  generous  warmth;  he 
brought  out  a  volume  of  British  Essays  in 
Favour  of  the  Brave  Corsicans,  sent  Paoli 
Johnson's  Works  and,  what  was  more  sub- 
stantial, forwarded  a  quantity  of  ordnance, 
to  buy  which  he  had  managed  to  raise  a 
subscription  of  £700.  His  desire  to  be  a  well- 
known  man  now  began  to  receive  some  gratifi- 
cation and  he  frankly  confesses  his  pleasure 
at  having  such  men  as  Johnson,  Hume  and 
Franklin  dining  with  him  at  his  chambers. 
Nor  will  any  reasonable  man  blame  him. 
His  snobbishness,  if  it  is  to  be  so  called,  was 
always  primarily  a  snobbishness  of  mind  and 
character,  not  of  wealth  or  rank. 

Nothing  else  of  importance  occurred  to  him 
in  these  years.  He  was  much  occupied  with 
the  great  law-suit  about  the  succession  to  the 
Douglas  propertj^  on  which  he  wrote  two 
pamphlets  and  was  so  sure  of  the  justice  of  his 
view  that  he  once  dared  to  tell  Johnson  he 
knew  nothing  about  that  subject.  He  was 
Avith  Johnson  at  Oxford  in  1768  and  they 
were  already  talking  of  going  to  the  Hebrides 


82    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

together.  The  next  year,  1769,  saw  the  con- 
quest of  Corsica  by  the  French  to  whom  the 
Genoese  had  ceded  their  claims.  The  result 
was  that  Paoli  came  to  London,  where  he  lived 
till  1789,  and  Boswell  was  constantly  with 
him.  In  this  year  he  did  at  least  one  very 
foolish  thing,  and  at  least  one  very  wise  one. 
He  made  himself  ridiculous  by  going  to  the 
Shakespeare  Jubilee  at  Stratford  and  appear- 
ing in  Corsican  costume  with  "  Viva  la 
Liberia  "  embroidered  on  his  cap.  He  also 
took  the  most  sensible  step  of  his  whole  life  in 
marrying  his  cousin,  Margaret  Montgomerie, 
on  November  25.  She  never  liked  Johnson, 
and  her  husband  had  the  candour  to  report  an 
excellent  sally  of  hers  at  his  and  his  sage's 
expense  :  "  I  have  seen  many  a  bear  led  by  a 
man ;  but  I  never  before  saw  a  man  led  by  a 
bear."  But  though,  as  Boswell  says,  she 
could  not  be  expected  to  like  his  "  irregular 
hours  and  uncouth  habits,"  she  never  failed 
in  courtesy  to  him  :  and  he  on  his  part  was 
unwearied  in  sending  friendly  messages  to 
his  "  dear  enemy "  as  he  called  her,  and 
was  well  aware  of  her  importance  to  her 
husband.  The  event  unhappily  proved  his 
prescience;  for  after  her  death  in  1789, 
Boswell's  downward  course  was  visibly 
accelerated. 

After    Boswell's    marriage    there    was    no 


BOSWELL  AND  JOHNSON         83 

communication  between  him  and  Johnson 
for  a  year  and  a  half,  and  they  did  not  meet 
again  till  March  1772,  when  Bos  well  came  to 
London,  and  stayed  some  time.  The  next 
year  he  came  again,  and,  by  Johnson's  active 
support,  was  elected  a  member  of  "  The  Club," 
a  small  society  of  friends  founded  by  Reynolds 
and  Johnson  in  1764.  At  first  it  met  weekly 
for  supper,  but  after  a  few  years  the  members 
began  the  custom  of  dining  together  on  fixed 
dates  which  has  continued  to  the  present 
day.  Among  the  members  when  Boswell  was 
elected  were  Johnson  and  Reynolds,  Burke, 
Goldsmith  and  Garrick.  Gibbon  and  Charles 
Fox  came  in  the  next  year,  and  Adam  Smith 
in  1775.  In  1780  the  number  of  members 
was  enlarged  to  thirty-five  which  is  still  the 
limit.  "The  Club**  has  always  maintained 
its  distinction,  and  a  recent  article  in  the 
Edinburgh  Review  records  that  fifteen  Prime 
Ministers  have  been  members  of  it,  as  well  as 
men  like  Scott,  Tennyson,  Hallam,  Macaulay 
and  Grote.  The  first  advantage  over  and 
above  pride  and  pleasure  derived  by  Boswell 
from  his  election  was  the  acquaintance  of 
Burke,  which  he  had  long  desired  and  retained 
through  life.  Burke  said  of  him  that  he  had 
so  much  good  humour  naturally  that  it  was 
scarcely  a  virtue  in  him. 

In  the  autumn  of  that  year,  1773,  Johnson 


F2 


84    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE  \ 

and  Boswell  made  their  famous  tour  to  the 
Hebrides.  They,  in  fact,  went  over  much 
more  than  the  Hebrides,  seeing  the  four 
Universities  of  Edinburgh,  St.  Andrews, 
Aberdeen  and  Glasgow,  besides  many  less 
famous  places.  Johnson  says  they  were 
everywhere  "  received  like  princes  in  their 
progress,"  and  though  no  doubt  hospitality 
was  freer  in  those  days  when  travellers  were 
few  and  inns  poor,  yet  the  whole  story  is  a 
remarkable  proof  of  Johnson's  fame  and 
Boswell's  popularity.  The  University  Pro- 
fessors vied  %vith  each  other  in  paying  civilities 
to  Johnson,  the  town  of  Aberdeen  gave  him 
its  freedom,  and  among  their  hosts  were 
magnates  like  the  Duke  of  Argyll,  Lord  Errol 
and  Lord  Loudoun,  who  "  jumped  for  joy  " 
at  their  coming,  and  great  men  of  law  or 
learning  like  Lord  Monboddo  and  Lord 
Elibank. 

By  this  time  all  the  important  events  in 
Boswell's  life  were  over  except  the  publication 
of  his  two  great  books,  the  Tour  to  the  Hebrides 
and  the  Life  of  Johnson.  During  all  the  ten 
years  which  Johnson  still  had  to  live,  except 
1780  and  1782,  the  two  friends  managed  to 
spend  some  time  together,  and  when  they  did 
not,  the  friendship  was  maintained  by  corre- 
spondence. Boswell's  father  died  in  1782, 
and  Boswell  came  into  possession  of  the  estate. 


BOSWELL  AND   JOHNSON         85 

worth  £1,600  a  year.  Johnson  and  Bos  well 
took  more  than  one  "  jaunt  "  in  the  country 
together,  visiting  Oxford,  Lichfield  and  other 
places.  They  were  at  Oxford  together  in 
June  1784;  but  Johnson  was  then  evidently 
failing.  On  their  return  to  London,  Boswell 
busied  himself  with  the  help  of  Reynolds  in 
trying  to  get  Johnson's  pension  increased,  so 
that  he  might  be  able  to  spend  the  winter 
abroad.  Johnson  was  very  pleased  on  hearing 
of  the  attempt,  saying,  when  Boswell  told  him, 
*' '  This  is  taking  prodigious  pains  about  a 
man.'  '  O,  sir,'  said  Boswell,  '  your  friends 
would  do  everything  for  you.'  He  paused, 
grew  more  and  more  agitated,  till  tears 
started  into  his  eyes,  and  he  exclaimed  with 
fervent  emotion,  *  God  bless  you  all.'  I 
was  so  affected  that  I  also  shed  tears.  After 
a  short  silence  he  renewed  and  extended  his 
grateful  benediction,  '  God  bless  you  all,  for 
Jesus  Christ's  sake.' "  Those  were  the  last 
words  Boswell  heard  under  Johnson's  roof. 
The  next  day  they  both  dined  with  Reynolds, 
and  on  July  2  Boswell  left  London,  to  see 
Johnson  no  more.  Johnson  died  on  the 
13th  of  December  1784. 

Fitful  and  unsuccessful  legal  and  political 
ambitions  occupied  a  large  part  of  Boswell's 
later  years.  He  made  some  approaches  to 
standing  as  a  candidate  for  Ayrshire  in  1784, 


86    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

and  again  in  1788,  was  called  to  the  English 
Bar  in  1786,  attached  himself  to  Lord  Lonsdale, 
and  hoped  to  enter  Parliament  for  one  of  his 
boroughs,  but  seems  to  have  got  nothing  out 
of  his  connection  with  that  insolent  old  bully 
but  a  certain  amount  of  humiliation  and  the 
Recordership  of  Carlisle.  That  unimportant 
office  was  the  only  substantial  reward  he 
received  from  all  his  long  suit  and  service  in 
the  antechambers  of  law  and  politics.  What- 
ever he  achieved  he  owed  to  literature  and  the 
friends  his  love  of  literature  had  brought  him. 
It  was  not  the  laird  or  the  lawyer,  but  the 
friend  and  biographer  of  Johnson  whom 
the  Royal  Academy  appointed  in  1791  to 
the  complimentary  office  of  their  Secretary 
for  Foreign  Correspondence.  And  those  last 
years,  while  they  brought  him  disappoint- 
ment in  everything  else,  saw  him  take  definite 
rank  as  a  successful  author.  The  Tour  to  the 
Hebrides  was  published  in  1785,  and  sold  out 
in  a  few  weeks.  The  third  edition  was  issued 
within  a  year  of  the  appearance  of  the  first. 
It  was  followed  by  the  publication  of  Johnson's 
famous  Letter  to  Lord  Chesterfield  and  of  an 
account  of  his  Conversation  with  George  III, 
and  finally  in  1791  by  the  Life  itself.  A 
second  edition  of  this  was  called  for  in  1793. 
Boswell  only  lived  two  years  more.  He  died 
on  May  19, 1795.    He  left  two  sons:  Alexander, 


BOSWELL  AND   JOHNSON         87 

.who  became  Sir  Alexander,  was  the  principal 
mover  in  the  matter  of  the  Burns  Monument 
on  the  banks  of  Doon,  and  was  killed  in  a  duel 
in' 1822;  and  James,  who  supplied  notes  for 
the  third  edition  of  his  father's  great  book, 
and  edited  the  third  Variorum  Shakespeare, 
known  as  Boswell's  M alone,  in  1821. 

Such  were  the  main  outlines  of  the  life  of 
the  biographer.  We  may  now  turn  to  those 
of  the  life  which  he  owes  his  fame  to  recording. 
They  are  in  most  ways  very  unlike  his  oAvn. 
Samuel  Johnson  was  very  far  from  being  heir 
to  a  large  estate  and  an  ancient  name.  He 
was  the  son  of  a  bookseller  at  Lichfield,  and 
was  born  there  on  the  18th  of  September  1709, 
in  a  house  which  is  now  preserved  in  public 
hands  in  memory  of  the  event  of  that  day. 
His  father's  family  was  so  obscure  that  he 
once  said,  "  I  can  hardly  tell  who  was  my 
grandfather."  His  mother  was  Sarah  Ford, 
who  came  of  a  good  yeoman  stock  in  Warwick- 
shire. She  was  both  a  good  and  an  intelhgent 
woman.  Samuel  was  the  elder  and  only 
ultimately  surviving  issue  of  the  marriage. 
A  picturesque  incident  in  his  childhood  is 
that  his  mother  took  him  to  London  to  be 
"  touched  "  by  Queen  Anne  for  the  scrofula, 
or  "  king's  evil,"  as  it  was  called,  from  which 
he  suffered.  He  must  have  been  one  of  the 
last    persons    to    go    through    this    curious 


88    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS  CIRCLE 

ceremony,  which  the  Georges  never  performed, 
though  the  service  for  it  remained  in  the  Book 
of  Common  Prayer  for  some  years  after  the 
accession  of  George  I.  The  boy  made  an 
impression  upon  people  from  the  first.  Ha 
Hked  to  recall  in  later  life  that  the  dame  who 
first  taught  him  to  read  brought  him  a  present 
of  gingerbread  when  he  was  starting  for 
Oxford,  and  told  him  he  was  the  best  scholar 
she  had  ever  had.  Afterwards  he  went  to 
Lichfield  School,  and  at  the  age  of  fifteen  to 
Stourbridge.  At  both  he  was  evidently  held 
in  respect  by  boys  and  masters  alike.  Prob-- 
ably  the  curious  combination  in  him  of  the 
invalid  and  the  prize-fighter  which  was  con- 
spicuous  all  through  his  life,  already  arrested 
attention  in  his  boyhood.  He  played  none  of 
the  ordinary  games,  but  yet,  as  we  have 
already  seen,  was  acknowledged  as  a  leader 
by  the  boys,  and  his  abilities  were  the  pride 
of  the  school.  He  already  exhibited  the 
amazing  memory  which  enabled  him  in  later 
life  to  dictate  to  Boswell  his  famous  letter  to 
Chesterfield  rather  than  search  for  a  copy,  and 
to  confute  a  person  who  praised  a  bad  trans- 
lation from  Martial  by  a  contemptuous  "  Why, 
sir,  the  original  is  thus,"  followed  by  a 
recitation  not  only  of  the  Latin  original  which 
it  is  not  likely  he  had  looked  at  for  years,  but 
also  of  the  translation  which  he  had  only  read 


BOSWELL  AND   JOHNSON         89 

once.  So  on  another  occasion  when  Baretti, 
who  had  read  a  Httle  Ariosto  with  him  some 
years  before,  proposed  to  give  him  some  more 
lessons,  but  feared  he  might  have  forgotten 
their  previous  readings,  "  Who  forgets,  sir  ?  " 
said  Johnson,  and  immediately  repeated  three 
or  four  stanzas  of  the  Orlando.  To  the  lover 
of  literature  there  is  no  possession  more 
precious  than  a  good  verbal  memory,  and  this 
Johnson  enjoyed  to  a  very  unusual  degree 
all  through  his  life.  But  it  is  worth  noting 
that  he  was  entirely  free  from  the  defect 
which  commonly  results  from  an  exceptional 
memory.  He  always  thought  and  spoke 
for  himself,  and  was  never  prevented  from 
using  his  own  mind  and  his  own  words  by  the 
fact  that  his  memory  supplied  him  abund- 
antly with  those  of  others.  His  scholarly 
friend  Langton  annoyed  him  by  depending 
upon  books  too  much  in  his  conversation,  and 
one  of  his  compliments  to  Boswell  was,  "  You 
and  I  do  not  talk  from  books." 

After  he  left  Stourbridge  he  spent  two  years 
at  home  in  desultory  reading,  "  not  voyages 
and  travels,  but  all  literature,  sir,  all  ancient 
writers,  all  manly;  though  but  little  Greek, 
only  some  of  Anacreon  and  Hesiod,"  the 
result  of  which  was  that  when  he  went  up  to 
Oxford,  the  Master  of  his  College  said  he  was 
"  the  best  qualified  for  the  University  that 


90    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

he  had  ever  known  come  there."  His  College 
was  Pembroke,  of  which  he  became  a  Com- 
moner (not  a  Servitor,  as  Carlyle  said)  in 
1728.  The  Oxford  of  that  day  was  not  a 
place  of  much  discipline  and  the  official  order 
of  study  was  very  laxly  maintained.  It 
seems  not  to  have  meant  much  to  Johnson, 
and  he  is  described  as  having  spent  a  good 
deal  of  his  time  "  lounging  at  the  College 
gates  \vith  a  circle  of  young  students  round 
him,  whom  he  was  entertaining  with  wit  and 
keeping  from  their  studies."  Most  good 
talkers  find  the  first  real  sphere  for  their 
talent  when  they  get  to  the  University,  and 
the  best  of  all  was  not  likely  to  be  an  exception, 
nor  to  resist  that  strongest  of  the  intellectual 
temptations.  But  he  did  some  solid  reading, 
especially  Greek,  though  he  seemed  to  himself 
to  be  very  idle,  perhaps  because  his  standard 
was  so  high  that  he  used  to  say  in  later  life, 
"  I  never  knew  a  man  who  studied  hard." 
So  when  he  confesses  the  imperfections*  of 
his  Greek  scholarship,  and  other  people 
exaggerate  his  confession,  it  is  well  to  re- 
member the  reply  made  by  Jacob  Bryant 
when  Gifford  in  an  argument  quoted  Johnson's 
admission  that  "  he  was  not  a  good  Greek 
scholar,"  "  Sir,  it  is  not  easy  for  us  to  say  what 
such  a  man  as  Jolinson  would  call  a  good 
Greek  scholar."    A  man  whose  remedy  for 


BOSWELL  AND   JOHNSON         91 

sleeplessness  was  to  turn  Greek  epigrams  into 
Latin  was  at  any  rate  not  ignorant  of  Greek. 

Johnson  was  prevented  by  his  poverty  from 
getting  the  full  advantages  either  out  of  the 
life  or  the  studies  of  Oxford.  His  want  of 
shoes  prevented  his  attending  lectures,  his 
pride  forbad  him  to  receive  doles  of  help,  the 
friend,  said  to  be  a  Mi'.  Corbet  of  Shropshire, 
on  whose  promises  of  support  he  had  relied  in 
going  to  Oxford,  failed  him,  his  father's  business 
went  from  little  to  less ;  with  the  inevitable 
result  that  he  had  to  leave  Oxford  without  a 
degree.  This  was  in  December  1729.  But  he 
had  made  an  impression  there,  had  a  strong 
affection  for  his  College,  and  liked  going  to 
stay  there  in  the  days  of  his  glory.  His  usual 
host  was  one  Dr.  Adams,  the  Master  of  Pem- 
broke, who  had  once  been  his  tutor  but  told 
Boswell  that  the  relation  was  only  nominal; 
"  he  was  above  my  mark."  When  he  left 
Oxford  he  returned  to  his  Lichfield  home, 
where  his  father  died  two  months  later,  leaving 
so  little  behind  him  that  all  that  Johnson 
received  of  his  estate  was  twenty  pounds.  He 
seems  to  have  remained  at  Lichfield,  where  the 
poverty  of  his  family  did  not  prevent  his  mix- 
ing with  the  most  cultivated  society  of  a  town 
rich  in  cultivated  people,  till  1732,  when  he 
became  an  usher  in  a  school  at  Market  Bos- 
worth.     He  hated  this  monotonous  drudgery 


92    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

and  left  it  after  a  few  months,  going  to  live 
with  a  Mr.  Warren,  the  first  bookseller  to 
establish  himself  at  Birmingham,  whom  he 
helped  by  his  knowledge  of  literature.  Wliile 
in  Birmingham  he  did  a  translation  of  a  Jesuit 
book  about  Abyssinia,  for  which  Warren  paid 
him  five  guineas.  In  1734  he  returned  to 
Lichfield,  tried  without  success  to  obtain 
subscribers  for  an  edition  of  the  poems  of 
Politian,  and  offered  to  write  in  the  Gentleman's 
Magazine.  It  is  difficult  to  see  how  he  sup- 
ported himself  at  this  period  :  perhaps  he  was 
helped  by  his  mother  or  by  his  brother  who 
carried  on  the  bookselling  business  till  his 
death  a  little  later.  Anyhow  it  was  just  at 
this  time  that  he  took  a  step  for  which  poverty 
generally  finds  the  courage  more  quickly  than 
wealth.  He  married  Elizabeth  Porter  at  St. 
Werburgh's  Church,  Derby,  in  July  1735. 
Mrs.  Porter  was  a  widow  twice  his  age  and 
not  of  an  attractive  appearance ;  but  there  is 
no  doubt  that  Johnson's  love  for  her  was 
sincere  and  lasting.  To  the  end  of  his  life 
he  remembered  her  frequently  in  his  prayers 
*'  if  it  were  lawful,"  and  kept  the  anniversary 
of  her  death  with  prayers  and  tears.  Eighteen 
years  after  she  died  he  could  write  in  his  private 
note-books  that  his  grief  for  her  was  not  abated 
and  that  he  had  less  pleasure  in  any  good  that 
happened  to  him,  because  she  could  not  share 


BOSWELL  AND   JOHNSON         93 

it  :  and  in  1782  when  she  had  been  dead  thirty- 
years,  and  he  was  drawing  near  his  own  end, 
he  prays  for  her  and  after  doing  so,  noted 
"  perhaps  Tetty  knows  that  I  prayed  for  her. 
Perhaps  Tetty  is  now  praying  for  me.  God 
help  me." 

This  was  the  inner  truth  of  the  relation 
between  Johnson  and  his  elderly  wife,  but  it 
was  natural  and  indeed  inevitable  that  the 
world,  the  little  world  of  their  acquaintances, 
should  have  been  chiefly  alive  to  the  humorous 
external  aspect  of  the  marriage,  and  one  does 
not  wonder  that  his  friend  Beau  clerk,  who  had 
been  through  the  divorce  court,  should  have 
enjoyed  relating  that  Johnson  had  said  to  him, 
"  Sir,  it  was  a  love  marriage  on  both  sides  !  " 
Johnson's  own  account  of  the  actual  wedding 
is  singular  enough.  "  Sir,  she  had  read  the 
old  romances,  and  had  got  into  her  head  the 
fantastical  notion  that  a  woman  of  spirit  should 
use  her  lover  like  a  dog.  So,  sir,  at  first  she 
told  me  that  I  rode  too  fast,  and  she  could  not 
keep  up  with  me;  and,  when  I  rode  a  little 
slower,  she  passed  me,  and  complained  that  I 
lagged  behind.  I  was  not  to  be  made  the 
slave  of  caprice ;  and  I  resolved  to  begin  as  I 
meant  to  end.  I  therefore  pushed  on  briskly, 
till  I  was  fairly  out  of  her  sight.  The  road  lay- 
between  two  hedges,  so  I  was  sure  she  could 
not  miss  it;  and  I  contrived  that  she  should 


94    DR.   JOHNSON   AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

soon  come  up  with  me.     When  she  did,   I 
observed  her  to  be  in  tears." 

Mrs.  Johnson  was  the  widow  of  a  Birming- 
ham draper,  and  brought  her  husband  several 
hundred  pounds,  part  of  which  was  at  once 
spent  in  hiring  and  furnishing  a  large  house 
at  Edial  near  Lichfield  where  Johnson  proposed 
to  take  pupils.  But  no  pupils  came  except 
David  Garrick  and  his  brother,  the  sons  of  an 
old  Lichfield  friend,  and  the  "  academy  "  was 
abandoned  after  a  year  and  a  half.  The  lack 
of  pupils,  however,  was  perhaps  a  blessing  in 
disguise,  for  it  enabled  Johnson  to  write  most 
of  his  tragedy  Irene,  %vith  which  he  went  to 
London  in  March  1737.  His  pupil,  David 
Garrick,  went  with  him  to  study  law,  and  when 
Garrick  was  a  rich,  famous  and  rather  vain 
man,  Johnson,  who  liked  to  curb  the  "insolence 
of  wealth  "  once  referred  to  1737  as  the  year 
"  when  I  came  to  London  Avith  twopence  half- 
penny in  my  pocket;  and  thou,  Davy,  with 
thi'ce -halfpence  in  thine."  Nothing  came  of 
this  first  visit  to  the  capital.  He  lived  as  best 
he  could,  dining  for  eightpence,  and  seeing  a 
few  friends,  one  of  whom  was  Henry  Hervey, 
son  of  the  Earl  of  Bristol,  of  whose  kindness  he 
always  retained  an  affectionate  memory,  so 
that  he  once  said  to  Boswell,  "  If  you  call  a 
dog  Hervey,  I  shall  love  him."  In  the  summer 
he   returned   to    Lichfield,    and    finished   his 


BOSWELL  AND   JOHNSON         95 

tragedy,  after  which  he  brought  his  wife  back 
with  him  to  London  which  was  his  home  for 
the  rest  of  his  hfe.  Efforts  to  get  Irene  per- 
formed were  unsuccessful,  but  he  soon  began 
to  write  regularly  for  the  Gentlemmi's  Maga- 
zine, of  which  he  held  so  high  an  opinion  that 
he  looked  "  with  reverence  "  on  the  house 
where  it  was  printed.  To  this  he  contributed 
essays  and  was  soon  employed  to  wi'ite  the 
Parliamentary  Debates  which,  in  the  days 
before  reporters,  were  made  up  with  fictitious 
names  from  such  scanty  notes  as  could  be  got 
of  the  actual  speeches.  There  is  a  story  of  his 
being,  many  years  later,  in  a  company  who 
were  praising  a  famous  oration  of  Chatham, 
and  were  naturally  a  good  deal  startled  by  his 
quietly  saying,  "  That  speech  I  WTote  in  a 
garret  in  Exeter  Street."  He  continued  to 
do  this  work  till  1743  when  he  became  aware 
that  the  speeches  were  taken  as  authentic  and 
refused  to  be  "  accessory  to  the  propagation 
of  falsehood."  But,  while  engaged  in  it,  he 
had  had  no  scruples  about  taking  care  "  that 
the  Whig  dogs  should  not  have  the  best  of  it." 
A  much  more  important  matter  than  this 
hack-work  was  the  publication  of  his  London, 
a  poem  in  imitation  of  the  Third  Satire  of 
Juvenal.  This  appeared  in  May  1738.  He 
got  ten  guineas  for  it,  which  he  was  in  no 
position  to  despise ;  but  he  also  got  something 


96    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

much  more  important,  an  established  name 
in  the  world  of  letters.  Every  one  talked  of 
him,  and  Pope,  who  published  his  "  1738  "  in 
the  same  year,  was  not  only  generous  enough 
to  inquire  about  him,  and  to  say  when  told 
that  the  author  of  London  was  some  obscure 
man,  "He  will  soon  be  deterred"*  but  also  to 
try  to  get  him  an  Irish  degree  of  M.A.  This 
was  in  view  of  some  attempts  Johnson  made 
to  escape  from  dependence  on  journalism  for 
his  daily  bread  :  but  they  were  all  unsuccessful, 
and  till  he  received  his  pension  his  only 
source  of  income  was  what  his  various 
writings  produced.  In  such  circumstances  he 
naturally  wrote  many  things  of  quite  ephemeral 
interest  which  call  for  no  mention  now.  Per- 
haps the  only  prose  work  of  permanent  value 
he  produced  in  these  years  was  the  life  of  his 
mysterious  friend,  Richard  Savage.  This 
curious  volume  appeared  in  1744.  The  subject 
of  it  died  in  1743.  He  and  Johnson  had 
been  companions  both  in  extreme  poverty 
and  in  the  intellectual  pleasures  which  in 
such  men  poverty  is  unable  to  annihilate. 
Mrs.  Johnson  seems  to  have  been  out  of 
London  at  this  time,  and  the  two  struggling 
men  of  letters  often  passed  nights  together, 
walking  and  talking  in  the  streets  and 
squares  without  the  price  of  a  night's  lodg- 
ing   between    them.      Johnson's    account  of 


BOSWELL  AND   JOHNSON         97 

his  friend  did  not  fill  his  pocket,  but  must 
have  contributed  something  to  his  fame  as  it 
was  very  favourably  criticized.  It  was  the 
occasion  of  Reynolds  fii'st  becoming  acquainted 
with  his  name.  He  was  so  interested  by  the 
book  that,  having  taken  it  up  while  standing 
with  his  arm  leaning  upon  a  chimney-piece, 
he  read  the  whole  without  sitting  down  and 
found  his  arm  quite  benumbed  when  he  got 
to  the  end. 

"  Slow  rises  worth  by  poverty  depressed." 
Johnson  had  now  been  seven  years  in  London, 
but  had  not  yet  found  the  way  to  do  anything 
worthy  of  his  powers.  If  he  had  died  then, 
only  the  curious  and  the  learned  would  have 
known  his  name  to-day.  A  single  satire  in 
verse  would  never,  by  itself,  have  had  the 
force  to  push  its  way  through  the  ever-in- 
creasing crowd  of  applicants  that  besiege  the 
attention  of  posterity.  But  the  next  year, 
1745,  is  the  literary  turning-point  of  his  life. 
Before  it  was  over  he  had  beg-un  to  deal  with 
two  subjects  with  which  much  of  his  remaining 
life  was  occupied,  and  on  which  much  of  his 
fame  depends.  He  had  published  a  pamphlet 
upon  Shakespeare's  Macbeth  which  won  the 
praise  of  Warburton,  for  which  Johnson  always 
felt  and  showed  his  gratitude  ("  He  praised  me 
at  a  time  when  praise  was  of  value  to  me  ") ; 
and,  if  Boswell  is  right,  he  had  begun  to  occupy 


98    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

himself  wdth  the  idea  of  making  an  English 
Dictionary.  Thus,  poor  and  obscure  as  he 
was  in  those  years,  sick  with  deferred  hope  as 
he  must  have  been,  he  had  in  fact  laid  the 
foundation-stones  of  the  authority  and  fame 
he  was  soon  to  enjoy  as  the  Editor  of  Shake- 
speare and  above  all  as  "  Dictionary  Johnson." 
Now  at  last  he  began  to  do  work  worthier  of  his 
powers.  The  "  Plan  for  a  Dictionary  of  the 
English  Language  "  was  published  in  1747  and 
in  the  same  year  he  wrote  the  admirable 
Prologue  for  the  opening  of  Drury  Lane 
Theatre,  of  which  his  pupil,  David  Garrick, 
more  fortunate  than  the  master  with  whom 
he  had  come  to  London,  was  now  become 
manager. 

Two  years  later  Garrick  produced  the 
long-delayed  tragedy  of  Irene.  It  is  not  a 
great  drama,  as  Johnson  well  knew,  at  least 
in  his  later  years.  There  is  a  story  of  his  being 
told  that  a  certain  IVIr.  Pot  called  it  "  the  finest 
tragedy  of  modern  times,"  to  which  his  only 
reply  was,  "  If  Pot  says  so,  Pot  lies."  But  this 
hardly  has  the  genuine  ring  about  it.  Even 
Garrick's  talent  and  friendship  could  not  make 
Irene  a  success,  but  the  performance  brought 
Johnson  a  little  welcome  profit  and  enabled 
him  to  sell  the  book  to  Dodsley  for  a  hundred 
pounds.  In  the  same  year,  1749,  a  more 
lasting  evidence  of  his  poetic  powers  was  given 


BOSWELL  AND   JOHNSON         99 

by  the  appearance  of  The  Vanity  of  Human 
Wishes,  another  Juvenalian  imitation,  but 
freer  and  bolder  than  the  first.  From  1750 
to  1752  he  was  writing  The  Rambler,  a  sort  of 
newspaper  essay  which  appeared  every  Tues- 
day and  Friday.  He  wrote  it  almost  entirely 
himself,  and  almost  always  at  the  last  moment, 
when  the  printer  was  calling  for  it.  No  one 
will  now  wonder  that  it  never  had  a  large 
circulation  as  a  periodical,  for  it  usually 
exhibits  him  at  his  gravest,  and  many  of  the 
essays  are  scarcely  distinguishable  from  ser- 
mons. But  that  age  had  grave  tastes  and 
few  temptations  to  intellectual  frivolity.  We 
have  seen  that  the  idlest  sort  of  reading 
Johnson  could  think  of  for  a  boy  was  "  voyages 
and  travels  " ;  novels  he  does  not  mention, 
indeed  there  were  then  very  few  of  them; 
plays  he  rather  strangely  ignores  :  newspapers, 
as  we  now  know  them  and  suffer  by  them, 
he  of  course  could  not  so  much  as  conceive. 
The  Rambler  had  no  sixpenny  magazines  of 
triviality,  no  sensational  halfpenny  papers, 
to  compete  with  it,  and  it  pursued  an  even 
course  of  modest  success  for  its  two  years  of 
life.  The  greatest  pleasure  it  brought  Johnson 
was  the  praise  of  his  wife,  who  said  to  him,  "  I 
thought  very  well  of  you  before ;  but  I  did  not 
imagine  you  could  have  written  anything  equal 
to  this."     That  was  just  the  discovery  a  good 

G2 


100    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

many  people  beside  his  wife  were  making 
about  Johnson  in  those  years  :  with  the  result 
that  when  The  Rambler  appeared  as  a  book, 
it  sold  well  and  had  gone  through  twelve 
editions  by  the  time  Bos  well  wrote  its  author's 
life. 

Three  years  after  the  cessation  of  The 
Rambler  and,  unhappily,  also  three  years  after 
the  death  of  his  wife,  with  whom  it  would  have 
been  his  chief  happiness  to  share  his  success, 
the  great  Dictionary  appeared.  It  may  safely 
be  said  that  no  single  Englishman  has  ever 
accomplished  a  literary  task  of  such  vast 
extent.  The  mere  labour,  one  might  say  the 
mere  dull  drudgery,  of  collecting  and  arranging 
the  materials  of  such  a  work  is  enormous.  Nor 
could  any  literary  labour  bring  with  it  greater 
temptations.  Johnson's  success  is  not  more 
due  to  his  learning  and  powers  of  mind  than 
to  the  good  sense  which  never  failed  him  and 
the  strong  will  which  he  could  generally  exert 
when  he  chose.  He  pleased  himself  at  first, 
as  he  tells  us  in  his  Preface,  "  with  a  prospect 
of  the  hours  which  I  should  revel  away  in 
feasts  of  literature  " ;  but  that,  of  course,  was 
where  the  danger  lay.  A  man  of  an  equally 
strong  love  of  literature  and  a  weaker  will 
would  have  allowed  himself  to  be  swept  away 
by  the  indulgence  of  curiosity,  and  the  luxury 
of  desultory  reading;  but  Johnson  soon  saw 


BOSWELL  AND  JOHNSON       101 

that  these  visions  of  intellectual  pleasure  were 
"  the  dreams  of  a  poet  doomed  at  last  to  wake 
a  lexicographer  " ;  and  that,  if  he  was  to  do 
the  thing  he  had  undertaken  to  do,  he  must 
set  stern  limits,  not  only  to  the  pleasures  of 
study,  but  also  to  the  delusive  quest  of  un- 
attainable perfection,  which  is  the  constant 
parent  of  futility.  He  realized,  as  so  many 
men  of  letters  have  failed  to  realize,  that  "  to 
deliberate  whenever  I  doubted,  to  inquire 
whenever  I  was  ignorant,  would  have  pro- 
tracted the  undertaking  without  end  and 
perhaps  without  much  improvement " ;  and 
instead  of  attempting  the  impossible  and 
achieving  nothing,  he  was  wise  enough  and 
modest  enough,  by  attempting  only  the 
attainable,  to  place  himself  in  a  position  to 
achieve  all  that  he  attempted. 

The  praise  he  deserved  was  somewhat  slow 
in  coming,  as  is  commonly  the  case  with  the 
greatest  literary  achievements.  But  though, 
as  he  sadly  says  in  the  last  words  of  his  great 
Preface,  most  of  those  whom  he  wished  to 
please  had  sunk  into  the  grave,  and  he  had 
therefore  little  to  hope  or  fear  from  praise  or 
censure,  yet  he  was  always  and  before  all 
things  a  human  being,  and  only  a  creature 
above  or  below  humanity  could  have  been 
insensible  to  the  pleasure  of  the  new  fame,  the 
new  authority  and  the  new  friends  which  his 


102    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

Dictionary  gradually  brought  him.  Before 
many  years  had  passed  the  "  harmless  drudge," 
as  he  himself  had  defined  a  lexicographer,  had 
become  the  acknowledged  law-giver  and  dicta- 
tor of  English  letters ;  he  had  gathered  round 
him  a  society  of  the  finest  minds  of  that 
generation,  he  had  received  a  public  pension 
which  secured  his  independence,  he  had  begun 
the  long  friendship  which  gave  him  a  second 
home  for  more  than  fifteen  years.  These 
things  did  not  all  come  at  once — he  did  not 
know  the  Thrales  till  1764  or  1765— but  the 
true  turning-point  in  his  career  is  the  publica- 
tion of  his  Dictionary.  He  was  still  poor  for 
some  years  after  that,  and  still  much  occupied 
in  the  production  of  hack-work  :  but  he  was 
never  again  obscure  and  was  soon  to  be 
famous.  Within  a  year  after  the  appearance 
of  the  Dictionary  he  had  issued  his  Proposals 
for  an  Edition  of  Shakespeare,  the  second  in 
time  and  perhaps  in  importance  of  his  three 
great  works.  His  new  position  secured  him 
a  good  number  of  subscribers  and  he  in- 
tended to  publish  it  the  next  year,  1757;  but 
the  interruptions  of  indolence,  business  and 
pleasure,  as  he  himself  says  of  Pope,  usually 
disappoint  the  sanguine  expectations  of 
authors,  and  the  book  did  not  in  fact  appear 
till  1765. 

Neither  Shakespeare  nor  idleness  had  occu- 


BOSWELL  AND   JOHNSON       103 

pied  the  whole  of  the  intervening  years. 
From  1758  to  1760  he  produced  a  weekly- 
paper  called  The  Idler,  of  the  same  character 
as  The  Rambler.  In  1759  he  wrote  his  once 
famous  story  Rasselas  to  pay  the  expenses  of 
his  mother's  funeral.  It  was  written  in  the 
evenings  of  a  single  week.  Good  judges  thought 
that,  if  he  had  known  how  to  make  a  bargain, 
he  ought  to  have  received  as  much  as  four 
hundred  pounds  for  this  book,  which  was 
translated  into  most  of  the  European  lan- 
guages ;  but  he  did  not  in  fact  receive  more 
than  a  hundred  pounds  for  the  first  and 
twenty-five  for  the  second  edition.  By  this 
time  he  could  visit  Oxford,  from  which 
University  he  had  received  the  degree  of 
M.A.  when  his  Dictionary  was  on  the  eve  of 
publication  :  and  another  sign  of  the  position 
he  was  beginning  to  occupy  is  that  we  find 
Smollet  writing  of  him  in  1759  as  the  "  great 
Cham  of  literature."  More  substantial  evi- 
dences followed  in  1762  when  George  III  was 
advised  by  Bute  to  grant  him  a  pension  of 
£300  a  year,  an  income  which  must  have 
seemed  boundless  affluence  to  a  man  who  had 
never  known  a  time  when  five  pounds  was  not 
an  important  sum  to  him. 

Next  year  came  the  event  which  was  even 
more  important  to  his  fame  than  the  receipt 
of  the  pension  was  to  his  comfort.     In  1763 


104    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

he  met  Boswell  for  the  first  time.  Fortune 
now  began  to  smile  upon  him  in  good  earnest 
and  evidences  of  his  estabhshed  position  and 
prosperity  follow  each  other  in  rapid  succes- 
sion. "  The  Club  "  (its  proper  and  still  existing 
name,  though  Boswell  occasionally  calls  it 
The  Literary  Club)  was  founded  in  1764  and 
provided  him  for  the  rest  of  his  life  with  an 
ideal  theatre  for  the  display  of  his  amazing 
powers  of  talk,  though  it  appears  that  he  was 
not  in  his  later  years  a  very  regular  attendant. 
The  next  year,  1765,  was  probably  the  year 
in  which  he  first  met  Thrale,  the  great  brewer, 
and  his  clever  and  ambitious  wife.  No  event 
contributed  so  much  to  the  happiness  of  his 
after  years.  Thrale  was  a  man  of  character 
and  understanding,  and  w^as  not  without 
scholarly  tastes.  He  at  once  saw  the  value 
of  such  a  friend  as  Johnson,  lived  in  the  closest 
intimacy  with  him  for  the  rest  of  his  days, 
and  named  him  executor  in  his  will,  which 
gave  Johnson  an  opportunity  such  as  he 
always  liked,  of  mixing  in  business,  and 
incidentally  also,  of  saying  the  best  thing 
that  ever  was  said  at  the  sale  of  a  brewery. 
He  appeared  at  the  auction,  according  to  the 
story  told  by  Lord  Lucan,  *'  bustling  about 
with  an  inkhom  and  pen  in  his  button-hole, 
like  an  excise-man ;  and,  on  being  asked  what 
he  really  considered  to  be  the  value  of  the 


BOSWELL  AND  JOHNSON         105 

property,  answered,  '  We  are  not  here  to  sell 
a  parcel  of  boilers  and  vats,  but  the  poten- 
tiality of  growing  rich  beyond  the  dreams  of 
avarice.'  "  The  brewery  was  sold  for  £135,000 
to  Mr.  Barclay,  the  founder  of  the  present  firm 
of  Barclay  &  Perkins,  who  now  put  Johnson's 
head  on  the  labels  of  their  beer  bottles.  But 
it  was  not  so  much  on  the  silent  and  busy 
Thrale  himself  as  on  his  wife,  a  quick  and 
clever  woman  fond  of  literary  society,  that 
the  visible  burden,  honour  and  pleasure  of 
the  long  friendship  with  Johnson  fell.  Till 
the  breach  caused  by  her  second  marriage 
just  before  he  died  no  one  had  so  much 
of  his  society  as  Mrs.  Thrale.  She  soon 
became  "  my  mistress  "  to  him,  an  adaptation 
of  his  from  the  "  my  master  "  which  was  her 
phrase  for  her  husband.  And  for  him,  too, 
Thrale  was  "  my  master."  A  somewhat 
masterful  servant,  no  doubt,  to  them  both, 
but  he  loved  them  sincerely  and  was  deeply 
grateful  for  their  kindness.  He  lived  at  their 
house  at  Streatham  as  much  as  he  liked,  and 
had  his  own  room  reserved  for  him  both  there 
and  at  their  London  house.  At  Streatham  he 
sometimes  remained  for  several  months,  and 
it  is  chiefly  there  that  Bos  well's  only  rival, 
Fanny  Burney,  saw  him.  It  may  be  said  that 
the  Thrales'  house  was  more  of  a  home  to  him 
than  anything  else  he  ever  knew  :  it  was  at 


106    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

least  the  only  house  since  his  childhood  in 
which  he  ever  lived  with  children.  There  in 
the  garden  or  in  the  library  he  studied  and 
idled  and  talked  at  his  ease ;  there  many  of  his 
friends  gathered  round  him;  there  his  wishes 
were  anticipated  and  his  words  listened  to, 
sometimes  with  fear,  sometimes  with  amuse- 
ment, sometimes  with  reverence,  always  with 
affection  and  almost  always  with  admiration. 
Well  might  he  write  to  IMrs.  Thrale  as  he  did 
in  October  1777  :  "  I  cannot  but  think  on  your 
kindness  and  my  master's.  Life  has  upon  the 
whole  fallen  short,  very  short,  of  my  early 
expectation;  but  the  acquisition  of  such  a 
friendship,  at  an  age  when  new  friendships  are 
seldom  acquired,  is  something  better  than  the 
general  course  of  things  gives  man  a  right  to 
expect.  I  think  on  it  with  great  delight.  I 
am  not  very  apt  to  be  delighted." 

Johnson  had  now  become  a  comparatively 
prosperous  man,  and  the  lives  of  the  prosper- 
ous have  a  way  of  producing  little  to  record. 
He  received  many  honours  and  compliments 
of  different  sorts.  Dublin  University  made 
him  LL.D.  in  1765,  he  had  his  well-known 
interview  with  George  III  in  1767,  the  Royal 
Academy  appointed  him  their  Professor  in 
Ancient  Literature  in  1769,  and  in  1775  he 
received  the  honorary  degree  of  D.C.L.  from 
the  University  of  Oxford.  But  the  only  events 


BOSWELL  AND  JOHNSON       107 

of  any  special  importance  in  the  last  twenty 
years  of  his  life  were  the  publication  of  his 
Shakespeare  in  1765,  his  journey  in  Scotland 
with  Bos  well  in  1773,  and  the  writing  of  his 
last  and  most  popular  book,  The  Lives  of  the 
Poets.  This  he  undertook  in  1777  and  com- 
pleted in  1781.  Its  easier  style,  pleasant 
digressions,  and  occasional  bits  of  autobio- 
graphy, represent  the  change  that  had  come 
over  Johnson's  life.  He  was  now  a  man  at 
ease  and  wrote  like  one.  For  the  note  of 
disappointed  youthful  ambition  which  is  only 
half  concealed  in  the  earlier  works  it  sub- 
stitutes an  old  man's  kindliness  of  retrospect. 
Matters  of  less  importance  in  these  years  were 
the  publication  of  his  Journey  to  the  Western 
Islands,  of  the  Prologue  to  Goldsmith's  Good- 
Natured  Man  and  of  his  political  pamphlets. 
The  False  Alarm,  Falkland's  Islands,  The 
Patriot,  and  Taxation  no  Tyranny.  But  none 
of  these  things  except  the  Lives  of  the  Poets 
occupied  much  of  his  time,  and  his  principal 
occupation '  in  his  old  age  was  talking  to  his 
friends.  He  travelled  a  good  deal,  often 
visiting  Oxford,  his  old  home  at  Lichfield, 
and  his  friend  Taylor's  house  in  Derbyshire. 
In  1775  he  went  to  France  with  the  Thrales, 
and  even  in  his  last  year  was  planning  a  tour 
to  Italy.  But  by  that  time  the  motive  was 
rather    health    than    pleasure.     He    had    a 


108    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

paralytic  stroke  in  1783  and  lost  his  powers 
of  speech  for  some  days.  One  of  the  doctors 
who  attended  him  was  Dr.  Heberden,  who  had 
cured  Cowper  of  a  still  graver  illness  twenty 
years  earlier.  His  strong  constitution  enabled 
him  to  recover  rapidly,  and  within  a  month 
he  was  paying  visits  in  Kent  and  Wiltshire. 
But  he  had  other  complaints,  and  never  again 
knew  even  that  modest  measure  of  health 
which  he  had  once  enjoyed. 

The  inevitable  loss  of  friends,  that  saddest 
and  most  universal  sorrow  of  old  age,  joined 
with  illness  to  depress  his  last  years.  Beau- 
clerk  died  in  1780,  Thrale  in  1781,  Levett  and 
Mrs.  Williams,  two  of  the  humble  friends  to 
whom  his  charity  had  given  a  home  in  his 
house,  in  1782  and  1783.  He  was  left  almost 
alone.  Yet  the  old  courage  and  love  of  society 
asserted  itself  to  the  last,  and  he  founded  a 
new  dining  club  the  year  before  he  died.  But 
it  was  too  late.  The  year  1784  opened  with 
a  prolonged  illness  lasting  for  months,  and 
though  in  the  summer  he  was  well  enough  to 
get  away  to  Oxford  vnih  Boswell  once  more, 
all  could  see  that  the  end  could  not  be  far  off. 
It  came  on  the  13th  of  December  1784.  He 
was  buried  in  Westminster  Abbey  on  December 
20th.  Burke  and  Windham,  mth  Colman  the 
dramatist  and  Sir  Joseph  Bankes  the  President 
of  the* Royal   Society,  were  among  the  pall- 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER         109 

bearers,  and  the  mourners  included  Reynolds 
and  Paoli.  Seldom  has  the  death  of  a  man  of 
letters  created  such  a  sense  of  loss  either  in 
the  public  at  large  or  among  his  friends. 
Murphy,  the  editor  of  Fielding,  and  biographer 
of  Garrick,  says  in  his  well-known  essay  that 
Johnson's  death  "  kept  the  public  mind  in 
agitation  beyond  all  previous  example." 
Those  great  men,  then,  who  attended  his 
funeral  represented  not  merely  themselves 
and  his  other  friends  but  the  intelligence  of 
the  whole  nation,  which  saw  in  the  death  of 
Johnson  the  fall  of  one  of  the  mighty  in  the 
moral  and  intellectual  Israel. 


CHAPTER  IV 

Johnson's  character  and  characteristics 

Something  has  already  been  said  in  the 
fu'st  chapter  of  this  book  about  the  character 
of  Johnson.  The  argument  of  that  chapter 
was  that  the  singular  position  of  Johnson  as, 
in  a  way,  the  most  national  of  our  men  of 
letters,  was  due  not  so  much  to  anything  he 
wrote,  or  even  to  anything  written  about 
him,  as  to  the  quality  of  his  own  mind  and 
character,  to  a  sort  of  central  sanity  that 
there  was  about  him  which  Englishmen  like 


110    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

to  think  of  as  a  thing  pecuUarly  Enghsh.  We 
may  now  pass  on  to  look  at  this  character  in 
a  httle  more  detail. 

Visitors  to  St.  Paul's  Cathedral  are  some- 
times astonished  as  they  walk  round  the 
space  under  the  dome  to  come  upon  a  statue 
which  (but  for  the  roll  -with  a  Greek  inscription 
upon  it)  would  appear  to  be  that  of  a  retired 
gladiator  meditating  upon  a  wasted  life. 
They  are  still  more  astonished  when  they  see 
under  it  an  inscription  indicating  that  it 
represents  Johnson.  The  statue  is  by  Bacon, 
but  is  not  one  of  his  best  works.  The  figure 
is,  as  often  in  eighteenth -century  sculpture, 
clothed  only  in  a  loose  robe  which  leaves 
legs,  arms,  and  one  shoulder  bare.  But  the 
strangeness  for  us  is  not  one  of  costume  only. 
If  we  know  anything  of  Johnson,  we  know 
that  he  was  constantly  ill  all  through  his  life ; 
and  whether  we  know  anything  of  liim  or  not 
we  are  apt  to  think  of  a  literary  man  as  a 
delicate,  weakly,  nervous,  and  probably  vale- 
tudinarian sort  of  person.  Nothing  can  be 
further  from  that  than  the  muscular  statue. 
And  in  this  matter  the  statue  is  perfectly 
right.  And  the  fact  which  it  reports  is  far 
from  being  unimportant.  The  body  and 
the  mind  are  inextricably  interwoven  in  all 
of  us,  and  certainly  in  Johnson's  case  the 
influence    of    the    body    was    obvious    and 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER         111 

conspicuous.  His  melancholy,  his  constantly 
repeated  conviction  of  the  general  unhappiness 
of  human  life,  was  certainly  the  result  of  his 
constitutional  infirmities.  On  the  other  hand, 
his  courage,  and  his  entire  indifference  to  pain, 
were  partly  due  to  his  great  bodily  strength. 
Perhaps  the  vein  of  rudeness,  almost  of 
fierceness,  which  sometimes  showed  itself 
in  his  conversation,  was  the  natural  temper 
of  an  invalid  and  suffering  giant.  That  at 
any  rate  is  what  he  was.  He  was  the  victim 
from  childhood  of  a  disease  which  resembled 
St.  Vitus's  Dance.  He  never  knew,  Boswell 
says,  "  the  natural  joy  of  a  free  and  vigorous 
use  of  his  limbs;  when  he  walked  it  was  like 
the  struggling  gait  of  one  in  fetters."  All 
accounts  agree  that  his  strange  gesticulations 
and  contortions  were  painful  for  his  friends  to 
witness  and  attracted  crowds  of  starers  in  the 
streets.  But  Reynolds  says  that  he  could 
sit  still  for  his  portrait  to  be  taken,  and  that 
when  his  mind  was  engaged  by  a  conversation 
the  convulsions  ceased.  In  any  case,  it  is 
certain  that  neither  this  perpetual  misery,  nor 
his  constant  fear  of  losing  his  reason,  nor  his 
many  grave  attacks  of  illness,  ever  induced  him 
to  surrender  the  privileges  that  belonged  to  his 
physical  strength.  He  justly  thought  no  char- 
acter so  disagreeable  as  that  of  a  valetu- 
dinarian, and  was  determined  not  to  be  one 


112    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

himself.  He  had  known  what  it  was  to  live  on 
f ourpence  halfpenny  a  day  and  scorned  the  life 
of  sofa  cushions  and  beef -tea  into  which  well- 
attended  old  gentlemen  so  easily  slip.  Once, 
when  IVIrs.  Thrale  asked  him  how  he  was,  his 
reply  was  "  Ready  to  become  a  scoundrel, 
Madam "  (his  word  for  a  self-indulgent 
invalid) ;  "  with  a  little  more  spoiling  you  will 
make  me  a  complete  rascal."  But  in  that 
she  never  succeeded.  Rather  he  carried  the 
war  into  her  camp,  and  when  they  were  driv- 
ing together  would  never  allow  her  to  com- 
plain of  rain,  dust,  or  any  such  inconveniences. 
"  How  do  other  people  bear  them  ?  "  he  would 
ask,  and  would  treat  those  who  talked  of  such 
topics  as  evidently  having  nothing  intelligent 
to  say.  "  A  mill  that  goes  without  grist  is  as 
good  a  companion  as  such  creatures,"  he  once 
broke  out.  He  required  no  valeting,  or 
nursing;  bathed  at  Brighton  in  October  when 
he  was  nearing  sixty,  refused  to  be  carried  to 
land  by  the  boatmen  at  lona,  as  Boswell  and 
Sir  Allan  Maclean  were,  but  sprang  into  the 
sea  and  waded  ashore ;  would  not  change  his 
clothes  when  he  got  wet  at  Inverary;  was  a 
hundred  years  before  his  time  in  his  love  of 
open  Avindows,  and  rode  fifty  miles  with  fox- 
hounds, only  to  declare  that  hunting  was  a 
dull  business  and  that  its  popularity  merely 
showed    the    paucity    of    human    pleasures. 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER        113 

Mrs.  Thrale  says  that  no  praise  ever  pleased 
him  more  than  when  some  one  said  of  him 
on  Brighton  Downs,  "Why,  Johnson  rides 
as  well  as  the  most  illiterate  fellow  in 
England."  He  was  always  eager  to  show 
that  his  legs  and  arms  could  do  as  much  as 
other  people's.  When  he  was  past  sixty-six 
he  ran  a  race  in  the  rain  at  Paris  with  his 
friend  Baretti.  He  insisted  on  rolling  down 
a  hill  like  a  schoolboy  when  staying  with 
Langton  in  Lincolnshire  :  once  at  Lichfield 
when  he  was  over  seventy  he  slipped  away 
from  his  friends  to  find  a  railing  he  used  to 
jump  when  he  was  a  boy,  threw  away  his 
coat,  hat,  and  wig,  and,  as  he  reported  with 
pride,  leapt  over  it  twice ;  and  on  another 
occasion  at  Oxford  was  bold  enough  to 
challenge  a  Fellow,  "  eminent  for  learning 
and  worth,"  and  "  of  an  ancient  and  respect- 
able family  in  Berkshire,"  to  climb  over  a 
wall  with  him.  Apparently,  however,  the 
climbing  did  not  actually  take  place,  for  the 
dignified  person  very  properly  refused  to 
compromise  his  dignity. 

It  is  evident  that  this  runner  of  races  and 
climber  of  walls  was  very  far  from  being  the 
sedentary  weakling,  afraid  to  enjoy  the 
pleasures  of  the  body  or  face  its  pains,  in  whom 
popular  imagination  fancies  it  sees  the  man  of 
letters.     No  man  was  ever  more  fearless  of 

H 


114    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

pain  than  Johnson.  The  only  thing  he  was 
afraid  of  was  death.  Of  the  extent  and  even 
violence  of  that  fear  in  him  till  within  a  few 
days  of  the  actual  event,  the  evidence,  in 
spite  of  what  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  has  said,  is 
conclusive  and  overwhelming.  It  comes  from 
every  one  who  knew  him.  '  But  that  was  a 
moral  and  intellectual  fear.  Of  physical 
fear  he  knew  nothing.  The  knife  of  the 
surgeon  had  terrors  then  which  our  generation 
has  happily  forgotten.  But  it  had  none 
for  Johnson.  When  he  lay  dying  his  only 
fear  was  that  his  doctors,  one  of  whom  he 
called  "  timidorum  timidissimus,"  would  spare 
him  pain  which  if  inflicted  might  have  pro- 
longed his  life.  He  called  to  them  to  cut 
deeper  when  they  were  operating,  and  finally 
took  the  knife  into  his  own  hands  and  did 
for  himself  what  he  thought  the  surgeon  had 
failed  to  do.  "  I  will  be  conquered,  I  will  not 
capitulate,"  were  his  words  :  and  he  acted 
on  them  till  the  very  last  days  were  come. 

Nor  was  this  courage  merely  desperation 
in  the  presence  of  the  great  Terror.  He  was 
as  brave  in  health  as  in  illness.  He  was 
perfectly  quiet  and  unconcerned  during  a 
dangerous  storm  between  Skye  and  Mull; 
and  on  being  told  that  it  was  doubtful  whether 
they  would  make  for  Mull  or  Col  cheerfully 
replied,    "  Col    for    my   money.'*     Roads    in 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER        115 

those  days  were  not  what  they  are  now : 
but  he  never  would  admit  that  accidents 
could  happen  and  pooh-poohed  them  when 
they  did.  Nor  was  his  courage  merely 
passive.  Beauclerk  did  not  find  it  so  when 
at  his  country  house  he  saw  Johnson  go  up 
to  two  large  dogs  which  were  fighting  and 
beat  them  till  they  stopped  :  nor  did  Langton 
when  he  warned  Johnson  against  a  dangerous 
pool  where  they  were  bathing,  only  to  see 
Johnson  swim  straight  into  it;  nor  did  the 
four  ruffians  who  once  attacked  him  in  the 
street  and  were  surprised  to  find  him  more 
than  a  match  for  the  four  of  them.  Whoever 
trifled  with  him  was  apt  to  learn  sooner  than 
he  wished  that  nemo  me  impune  lacessit  was 
a  saying  which  was  to  be  taken  very  literally 
from  Johnson's  mouth.  Garrick  used  to  tell 
a  story  of  a  man  who  took  a  chair  which  had 
been  placed  for  Johnson  at  the  Lichfield 
theatre  and  refused  to  give  it  up  when  asked, 
upon  which  Johnson  simply  tossed  man  and 
chair  together  into  the  pit.  He  proposed  to 
treat  Foote,  the  comic  actor,  in  much  the  same 
way.  Hearing  of  Foote's  intention  to  carica- 
ture him  on  the  stage  he  suddenly  at  dinner 
asked  Davies,  a  friend  of  Foote's,  "  what  was 
the  common  price  of  an  oak  stick,"  and  being 
answered  sixpence,  "  Why  then,  sir  (said  he), 
give  me  leave  to  send  your  servant  to  purchase 

H  2 


116    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

a  shilling  one.  I'll  have  a  double  quantity; 
for  I  am  told  Foote  means  to  take  me  off,  as 
he  calls  it,  and  I  am  determined  the  fellow 
shall  not  do  it  with  impunity."  The  threat 
was  sufficient ;  as  Johnson  said,  "  he  knew 
I  would  have  broken  his  bones."  Years 
afterwards  Foote,  perhaps  in  half -conscious 
revenge,  amused  himself  by  holding  Johnson 
up  to  ridicule  in  a  private  company  at  Edin- 
burgh. Unluckily  for  him  Boswell  was  present 
and  naturally  felt  Foote's  behaviour  an  act  of 
rudeness  to  himself.  So  he  intervened  and 
pleaded  that  Johnson  must  be  allowed  to 
have  some  sterling  wit,  adding  that  he  had 
heard  him  say  a  very  good  thing  about  Foote 
himself.  "  Ah,"  replied  the  unwary  Foote, 
"  my  old  friend  Sam ;  no  man  says  better 
things  :  do  let  us  have  it."  On  which  Boswell 
related  how  he  had  once  said  to  Johnson  when 
they  were  talking  of  Foote,  "  Pray,  sir,  is  not 
Foote  an  infidel  ?  "  to  which  Johnson  had 
replied,  "  I  do  not  know,  sir,  that  the  fellow 
is.  an  infidel ;  but  if  he  be  an  infidel,  he  is  an 
infidel  as  a  dog  is  an  infidel ;  that  is  to  say,  he 
has  never  thought  upon  the  subject."  Bos- 
well's  story  was  as  effective  as  his  master's 
stick.  There  was  no  more  question  that  night 
of  taking  off  Johnson  :  Foote  had  enough  to 
do  to  defend  himself  against  the  cannonade  of 
laughter  that  Boswell  had  brought  upon  him. 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER         117 

A  man  of  the  mettle  Johnson  shows  in  those 
stories  was  certain  to  have  no  more  fears  about 
defending  the  pubhc  than  about  defending 
himself.  So  when  he  thought  the  so-called 
poems  of  Ossian  a  fabrication  he  said  so  every- 
where without  hesitation;  and  when  their 
editor  or  author  Macpherson,  finding  other 
methods  fail,  tried  to  silence  him  by  bluster 
and  threats,  he  received  the  reply  which  is 
only  less  famous  than  its  author's  letter  to 
Lord  Chesterfield. 

"  Mr.  James  Macpherson, 

"  I  received  your  foolish  and  impudent 
letter.  Any  violence  offered  me  I  shall  do  my 
best  to  repel ;  and  what  I  cannot  do  for  my- 
self, the  law  shall  do  for  me.  I  hope  I  shall 
never  be  deterred  from  detecting  what  I  think 
a  cheat,  by  the  menaces  of  a  ruffian. 

"  What  would  you  have  me  retract  ?  I 
thought  your  book  an  imposture ;  I  think  it 
an  imposture  still.  For  this  opinion  I  have 
given  my  reasons  to  the  public,  which  I  here 
dare  you  to  refute.  Your  rage  I  defy.  Your 
abihties,  since  your  Homer,  are  not  so  formid- 
able, and  what  I  hear  of  your  morals  inclines 
me  to  pay  regard  not  to  what  you  shall  say 
but  to  what  you  shall  prove.  You  may  print 
this  if  you  will. 

"  Sam.  Johnson." 


118    DR.   JOHNSON   AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

The    first   thing  then   to    get    clear   about 
Johnson  is  that  there  was  a  very  vigorous 
animal  at  the  base  of  the  mind  and  soul  that 
we  know  in  his  books  and  in  his  talk.    Part  of 
the  universal    interest    he  has  inspired    hes 
in  that.     The  people  who  put  off  the  body  m 
this  life  may  be  divine,  though  that  is  far 
from  certain,  but  they  are  apt  to  affect  us 
little  because  we  do  not  feel  them  to  be  human. 
There  is  much  in  Johnson— a  turn  for  eating 
seven  or  eight  peaches  in  the  garden  before 
breakfast,     for     instance— which     gives     un- 
regenerate   beings   like   schoolboys   a   feehng 
of   confidence   at  once.     And   older   persons, 
not  yet  altogether  regenerate,  are  apt  to  have 
a  weakness  for  a  man  who  was  willing  to  be 
knocked  up  at  three  in  the  morning  by  some 
young  roysterers,  and  turn  out  with  them  for 
a  "  frisk  "  about  the  streets  and  taverns  and 
down  the  river  in  a  boat.     The  "  follies  of  the 
wise  "  are  never  altogether  follies.     Johnson 
at  midnight  outside  the  Temple  roaring  with 
Gargantuan  laughter  that  echoed  from  Temple 
Bar  to  what  we  now  call  Ludgate  Circus  is  a 
picture  his  wisest  admirers  would  be  slowest 
to  forget.     The  laugh  and  the  frisk  and  the 
peaches  are  so  many  hall-marks  to  assure  us 
that  the  philosopher  is  still  a  man  and  has  not 
forgotten  that  he  was  once  a  boy  :  that  he  has 
always  had  five  senses  like  the  rest  of  us ;  and 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         119 

that  if  he  bids  us  take  a  grave  view  of  Hfe  it 
is  not  because  he  knows  nothing  about  it. 

Another  note  of  cathohcity  in  Johnson  is 
his  wide  experience  of  social  conditions. 
The  man  in  him  never  for  an  instant  dis- 
appeared in  the  "  gentleman."  Very  few  of 
our  great  men  of  letters  have  ever  known 
poverty  in  the  real  sense  of  the  word,  in  the 
way  the  really  poor  know  it.  Johnson  had, 
and  he  never  forgot  it.  It  is  true  that  like 
most  people  who  have  known  what  it  is  to  be 
uncertain  about  to-morrow's  dinner  he  did 
not  much  care  to  talk  about  these  experiences. 
No  one  does  perhaps  except  politicians  who 
find  them  useful  bids  for  popularity  at  a  mass 
meeting.  Johnson  at  any  rate  when  he  had 
arrived  at  comparatively  easy  social  conditions 
frankly  admitted  that  he  did  not  like  "  low 
life."  His  sympathy  with  the  poor,  was,  as 
we  shall  see,  one  of  the  strongest  things  in 
him,  and  made  one  of  the  deepest  marks  in 
his  actual  life,;  but  he  never  thought  it  neces- 
sary to  indulge  in  polite  or  political  fictions 
about  the  superior  virtue  or  wisdom  of  the 
working  class.  "  Poverty,"  he  once  wrote 
in  words  that  come  at  first  sight  rather  start- 
lingly  from  the  mouth  of  so  strictly  Biblical  a 
Christian  as  he,  "  is  a  great  enemy  to  human 
happiness  ...  it  makes  some  virtues  im- 
practicable and  others  extremely  difficult." 


120    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

"  Of  riches,"  he  said  on  another  occasion,  "  it 
is  not  necessary  to  write  the  praise."  No 
doubt  the  opposition  between  such  remarks 
as  these,  meant  as  Johnson  meant  them,  and 
certain  sayings  in  the  Gospels,  is  hke  the 
opposition  between  many  contrasted  pairs  of 
sayings  in  the  New  Testament  itself,  more 
verbal  than  real.  But  it  is  as  strong  a  proof 
as  could  be  given  of  the  power  and  universality 
in  the  eighteenth  century  of  the  temper  which 
Butler  called  "  cool  and  reasonable,"  the 
temper  which  hated  and  despised  "  enthusi- 
asm," that  such  a  man  as  Johnson,  a  man, 
too,  who  owed  his  religious  faith  to  Law's 
Serious  Call,  could  use  such  words  without 
the  slightest  consciousness  of  their  needing 
explanation. 

The  fact  is  that  Johnson  never,  even  in  his 
religion,  left  his  open  eye  or  his  common  sense 
behind  him  :  and  common  sense  told  him, 
what  a  brighter  light  concealed  from  St. 
Francis  but  the  history  of  his  Order  was  to 
show  too  plainly  within  half  a  century  of  his 
death,  that  poverty  is  at  least  for  ordinary 
men  no  assured  school  of  the  Christian  virtues. 
Johnson's  attitude  towards  the  poor,  in  fact,  in- 
cluded the  whole  of  sympathy  and  understand- 
ing but  not  one  tittle  of  sentiment.  They 
had  the  benefit  of  the  greater  part  of  his  small 
income ;  he  gave  constantly,  both  to  those  who 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         121 

had  claims  on  him  and  to  those  who  had  none, 
really  loving  the  poor,  says  Mrs.  Thrale,  "  as 
I  never  yet  saw  any  one  else  do,  with  an 
earnest  desire  to  make  them  happy,"  and 
insisting  on  giving  them,  not  merely  relief, 
but  indulgence  and  pleasure.  He  wished  them 
to  have  something  more  than  board  and 
lodging,  some  "sweeteners  of  their  existence,'* 
and  he  was  not  always  frightened  if  the 
sweeteners  preferred  were  gin  and  tobacco. 
His  very  home  he  made  into  a  retreat,  as 
Mrs.  Thrale  says  with  little  exaggeration, 
for  "the  lame,  the  blind,  the  sad  and  the 
sorrowful " ;  and  he  gave  these  humble 
friends  more  than  board  and  lodging,  treating 
them  with  at  least  as  ceremonious  a  civility 
as  he  would  have  used  to  so  many  people  of 
fashion. 

He  held  no  theories  of  political  or  social 
equality;  on  the  contrary,  he  looked  upon 
such  theories  as  mischievous  nonsense  :  but 
the  respect  paid  to  him  in  his  later  years  by 
great  personages  never  made  him  take  a 
Mayfair  or  "  county-family "  view  of  life. 
He  might  stay  at  Inverary,  visit  Alnwick  and 
be  invited  to  Chatsworth,  but  it  took  more 
than  the  civilities  of  three  Dukes  to  blind  him 
to  the  fact  that  on  a  map  of  humanity  all  the 
magnates  in  the  world  occupy  but  a  small 
space.     Even  in  the  days  when  he  lived  at 


122    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

his  ease  in  a  rich  man's  house  and,  when  in 
his  own,  would  dine  out  every  day  lor  a  fort- 
night,  he  never  surrendered  himseU,   as  so 
many  who  have  at  last  reached  comfort  do, 
to  the  subtle  unrealities  of  the  drawing -room 
He  would  not  aUow  the  well -do -to  to   caU 
themselves    "the    world ":     and    ^^hen    S'^ 
Joshua  said  one  day  that  nobody  wore  laced 
coats  any  longer  and  that  o^ee  everybody 
had  worn  them,  "See  now."  said  Johnson, 
"  how  absurd  that  is ;   as  if  the  bulk  of  man- 
kind consisted  of  fine  gentlemen  that  came  to 
him  to  sit  for  their  pictures.     H  every  rnan 
who  wears  a  laced  coat  (that  he  can  pay  for) 
was   extirpated,    who    would    miss   them? 
So  when  Mrs.  Thrale  once  complamed  of  tne 
smell  of  cooking  he  told  her  she  was  a  fortunate 
woman  never  to  have  e'^Pf  ^°<=«d  ^he  dehght 
of  smelling  her  dinner  beforehand.        Which 
nleasure,"  she  answered,  "is  to  be  enjoyed 
f^  ^rfckion  by  such  as  have  the  happiness 
to  pass  through  Porridge  Island  of  a  morn- 
Za,"      Johnson's    answer    was    the    grave 
rebuke  of  a  man  from  whose  mind  the  darker 
side  of  a' prosperous  world  was  never  long 
absent.     "Come,  come,  let's  have  no  sneering 
at  what  is  serious  to  so  many  :   hundreds  of 
youTfellow-ereatures,  dear  lady,  turn  another 
lay  that  they  may  not  be  tempted  by  the 
luxuries  of  Porridge  Island  to  wish  for  grat.fi- 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER         123 

cations  they  are  not  able  to  obtain  :  you  are 
certainly  not  better  than  all  of  them  :  give 
God  thanks  that  you  are  happier."  It  is 
Mrs.  Thrale  who  herself  tells  the  story  :  and 
it  is  to  her  credit  that  she  calls  Johnson's 
answer  a  just  rebuke. 

But  Johnson's  equality  was  that  of  the 
moralist,  not  that  of  the  politician.  He  was 
the  exact  opposite  of  a  leveller,  believing  in 
the  distinction  of  ranks  as  not  only  a  necessity 
of  society,  but  an  addition  to  its  strength  and 
to  the  variety  and  interest  of  its  life.  He 
himself  scrupulously  observed  the  formalities 
of  social  respect,  and  would  no  doubt,  like 
Mr.  Gladstone,  have  repudiated  with  horror 
the  idea  of  being  placed  at  dinner  above  the 
obscurest  of  peers.  His  bow  to  an  Archbishop 
is  described  as  a  studied  elaboration  of 
temporal  and  spiritual  homage,  and  he  once 
went  so  far  as  to  imply  that  nothing  would 
induce  him  to  contradict  a  Bishop.  There 
no  doubt  he  promised  more  than  the  presence 
of  a  stupid  Bishop  or  a  Whig  Bishop  would 
have  allowed  him  to  perform.  For  no  con- 
siderations of  rank  ever  prevented  him  from 
expressing  his  own  opinions  or  trampling  upon 
those  of  other  people.  Except  Swift,  perhaps, 
he  was  the  most  independent  man  that  ever 
lived.  Of  Swift's  jealous  and  angry  arrogance 
he  had  nothing.     But  he  was  full  of  what  he 


124    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

himself  called  "  defensive  pride."  That  was 
his  answer  when  he  was  accused  of  showing  at 
least  as  much  pride  as  Lord  Chesterfield  in  the 
affair  of  the  Dictionary ;  "  but  mine,"  he  said, 
"  was  defensive  pride."  He  was  always  on  his 
guard  against  the  very  appearance  of  accepting 
the  patronage  of  the  great.  Even  Thackeray's 
Argus  eye  could  not  have  detected  a  grain  of 
snobbery  in  him.  At  Inverary  he  would  not 
let  Boswell  call  before  dinner  lest  it  should 
look  like  fishing  for  an  invitation ;  and  when 
he  dined  there  the  next  day  and  sat  next  the 
Duke,  he  did  not  refrain,  even  in  that  Whig 
holy  of  holies,  from  chaffing  about  one  of  the 
Campbells  who  "  had  been  bred  a  violent  Whig 
but  afterwards  kept  better  company  and 
became  a  Tory  "  !  So  once,  when  he  dined 
at  Bo  wood  with  Lord  Shelburne  he  refused  to 
repeat  a  story  at  the  request  of  his  host,  saying 
that  he  would  not  be  dragged  in  as  story- 
teller to  the  company.  And  he  would  never 
give  the  authority  for  any  fact  he  mentioned, 
if  the  authority  happened  to  be  a  lord.  Indeed 
he  carried  his  sturdy  independence  so  far  that 
in  his  last  years  he  fancied  that  his  company 
was  no  longer  desired  in  these  august  circles. 
"  I  never  courted  the  great,"  he  said ;  "  they 
sent  for  me,  but  I  think  they  now  give  me 
up " ;  adding,  in  reply  to  Boswell's  polite 
disbelief,   *'  No,   sir ;    great  lords  and  great 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         125 

ladies  don't  love  to  have  their  mouths 
stopped." 

Here  again  Johnson  represented  the  typical 
Englishman  as  foreigners  then  and  since  have 
read  his  character.  An  accepter  and  respecter 
of  rank  as  a  social  fact  and  a  political  principle, 
he  was  as  proud  in  his  way  as  the  proudest 
man  in  the  land.  Tory  as  he  was,  for  him 
every  freeborn  Englishman  was  one  of  the 
"  lords  of  human  kind  "  :  a  citizen  of  no  mean 
city,  but  of  one  in  which — 

"  ,     .     .     e'en  the  peasant  boasts  these  rights 
to  scan. 
And  learns  to  venerate  himself  as  man  !  " 

He  had  all  an  Englishman's  pride  in  England, 
as  was  prettily  seen  in  his  reply  to  Mrs.  Thrale 
in  the  theatre  at  Versailles ;  "  Now  we  are 
here  what  shall  we  act.  Dr.  Johnson  ?  The 
Englishman  at  Paris  ?  "  "  No,  no  ;  we  will 
try  to  act  Harry  the  Fifth  " ;  and  at  bottom 
he  thought  that  a  free  Englishman  was  too 
great  a  man  to  be  patronized  by  any  one  on 
earth. 

But  there  was  something  better  than  pride 
at  the  root  of  his  whole  attitude  towards  the 
rich  and  the  poor ;  and  that  was  his  humanity. 
Again  and  again,  as  one  studies  him,  one  comes 
back  to  that,  his  humanity,  his  love  of  men 
as  men.     It  was  that  which  made  him  one  of 


126    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

the  earliest  and  fiercest  enemies  of  the  slave 
trade.  So  early  as  1740  he  maintained  the 
natural  right  of  the  negroes  to  liberty;  and 
he  once  startled  "  some  very  grave  men  at 
Oxford  "  by  giving  as  his  toast  "  Here's  to 
the  next  insurrection  of  the  negroes  in  the 
West  Indies."  This  was  his  invariable  atti- 
tude from  first  to  last,  and  it  was  no  mere 
scoring  of  a  party  point  against  the  Americans 
when  he  asked,  in  Taxation  No  Tyranny, 
"  How  is  it  that  we  hear  the  loudest  yelps  for 
liberty  among  the  drivers  of  negroes  ?  "  No 
Tory  prejudices  and  no  sophistical  arguments 
were  ever  able  to  silence  in  him  the  voice  of 
common  humanity.  He  spared  his  own 
country  no  more  than  the  American  rebels, 
describing  Jamaica  as  "  a  den  of  tyrants  and 
a  dungeon  of  slaves,"  and  speaking  indignantly 
of  the  thousands  of  black  men  "  who  are  now 
repining  under  English  cruelty."  He  de- 
nounced, as  not  only  wicked  but  also  absurd 
and  foolish,  the  opinion  common  among 
the  "  English  barbarians  that  cultivate  the 
southern  islands  of  America,"  that  savages 
are  to  be  regarded  as  scarcely  distinct  from 
animals;  and  he  dreaded  discoveries  of  new 
lands  because  he  was  always  afraid  they  would 
result  in  conquest  and  cmelty. 

And  this  was  not  the  public  and  vicarious 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         127 

humanity  with  which  we  are  too  famihar. 
What  he  preached  to  others  he  practised  him- 
self. He  loved  all  life  and  all  the  men  and 
women  whom  he  saw  living  it.  It  takes  one's 
breath  away  at  fu'st  to  find  the  grave  moralist 
of  The  Rambler  coolly  saying  to  :Mi's.  Thrale 
and  Fanny  Burney,  "  Oh,  I  loved  Bet  Fhnt  !  " 
just  after  he  had  frankly  explained  to  them 
that  that  lady  was  "  habitually  a  slut  and  a 
drunkard  and  occasionally  a  thief  and  a 
harlot."  But  the  creature  was  what  we  call 
a  "  character,"  had  had  many  curious  ad- 
ventures, and  had  wiitten  her  life  in  verse 
and  brought  it  to  Johnson  to  correct,  an  offer 
which  he  had  declined,  giving  her  half  a  crown 
instead  which  she  "  liked  as  well."  He  had, 
in  fact,  got  below  the  perhaps  superficial  slut 
j  and  harlot  to  the  aboriginal  human  being, 
'  and  that  once  arrived  at  he  never  forgot  it. 
Nor  did  he  need  the  kindly  humours  of  old 
acquaintance  to  enable  him  to  discover  it. 
No  moral  priggishness  dried  up  the  tenderness 
with  which  he  regarded  the  most  forlorn  speci- 
mens of  humanity.  Boswell  tells  this  story. 
*'  Coming  home  late  one  night  he  found  a 
poor  woman  lying  in  the  street,  so  much 
exhausted  that  she  could  not  walk  :  he  took 
her  upon  his  back  and  carried  her  to  his  house, 
/  where  he  discovered  that  she  was  one  of  those 
wretched  females  who  had  fallen  into  the  lowest 


128    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

state  of  vice,  poverty  and  disease.  Instead  of 
harshly  upbraiding  her  he  had  her  taken  care 
of  with  all  tenderness  for  a  long  time  at  con- 
siderable expense  till  she  was  restored  to 
health,  and  endeavoured  to  put  her  into  a 
virtuous  way  of  living."  Like  JVIr.  Gladstone, 
he  exposed  his  own  character  to  suspicion 
by  his  kindness  to  such  poor  creatures  as 
this.  His  heart  was  always  open  to  the 
miserable,  so  that  Goldsmith  said  that  the 
fact  of  being  miserable  was  enough  to 
"  ensure  the  protection  of  Johnson."  Sir 
John  Hawkins  says  that,  when  some  one 
asked  him  how  he  could  bear  to  have  his 
house  full  of  "  necessitous  and  undeserving 
people,"  his  reply  was,  "  If  I  did  not  assist 
them  no  one  else  would,  and  they  must  be 
lost  for  want."  He  always  declared  that  the 
true  test  of  a  nation's  civilization  was  the 
state  of  its  poor,  and  specially  directed  Boswell 
to  report  to  him  how  the  poor  were  main- 
tained in  Holland.  When  his  mother's  old 
servant  lay  dying  he  went  to  say  good-bye  to 
her  and  prayed  with  her,  while  she,  as  he  says, 
*'  held  up  her  poor  hands  as  she  lay  in  bed  with 
great  fervour."  Then,  after  the  prayer,  "  I 
kissed  her.  She  told  me  that  to  part  was  the 
greatest  pain  that  she  had  ever  felt  and  that 
she  hoped  we  should  meet  again  in  a  better 
place.     I  expressed,   with   swelled  eyes  and 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         129 

great  emotion  of  tenderness,  the  same  hope. 
We  kissed  and  parted.  I  humbly  hope  to 
meet  again  and  to  part  no  more." 

Let  all  pictures  of  Johnson  as  a  harsh  and 
arrogant  bully  fade  away  before  this  touch- 
ing little  scene.  The  truth  is  that  at  the  root 
of  the  man  there  was  an  unfailing  spring  of 
human  love.  One  who  knew  him  very  well 
said  that  peace  and  goodwill  were  the  natural 
emanations  of  his  heart.  All  sorts  of  weakness 
found  a  friend  in  him.  He  was  markedly  kind 
to  children,  especially  little  girls,  to  servants, 
to  animals.  When  he  was  himself  in  great 
poverty  he  would  put  pennies  in  the  hands 
of  the  children  sleeping  on  doorsteps  in  the 
Strand,  as  he  walked  home  in  the  small  hours 
of  the  morning.  He  left  most  of  his  property 
to  his  negro  servant  Frank  :  and  so  united  a 
delicate  consideration  for  Frank's  feelings  with 
an  affection  for  his  cat  Hodge  that  he  always 
went  out  himself  to  buy  oysters  for  Hodge  lest 
Frank  should  think  himself  insulted  by  being 
employed  to  wait  upon  a  cat. 

Nor  did  this  human  and  social  element  in 
him  show  itself  only  in  such  grave  shape  as 
hatred  of  slavery  and  tenderness  to  the  poor. 
His  sense  of  kinship  with  other  men  was, 
indeed,  a  serious  conviction  held  on  serious 
grounds.  But  it  was  also  the  expression  of 
his  natural  good  nature,  and  overflowed  into 
I 


130    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

the  obvious  channels  of  kindly  sociability 
which  come  to  every  man  unsought,  as  well 
as  into  these  deeper  ones  of  sympathy  which 
are  only  found  by  those  who  seek  them. 
Those  who  know  him  only  tlirough  Boswell 
are  in  danger  of  over-accentuating  the  graver 
side  of  his  character.  In  Bos  well's  eyes  he 
was  primarily  the  sage  and  saint,  and  though 
he  exhibits  him  playing  many  other  parts  as 
well  it  is  on  these  two  that  the  stress  is 
especially  laid.  Other  people,  notably  Fanny 
Burney,  who  in  his  last  years  saw  a  great  deal 
of  him  at  the  Thrales',  enable  us  to  restore  the 
balance.  She  loved  and  honoured  him  with 
an  affection  and  reverence  only  short  of 
Boswell's :  and  her  youth,  cleverness  and 
charm  won  Johnson's  heart  as  no  one  M^on  it 
who  came  so  late  into  his  world.  Like  Bos- 
well she  had  a  touch  of  literary  genius,  and 
luckily  for  us  she  used  it  partly  to  -^vrite  about 
Johnson.  Hers  is  the  most  vivid  picture  we 
have  of  him  after  Boswell's,  and  it  is  notable 
that  she  is  for  ever  laying  stress  on  his  gaiety. 
The  seriousness  is  there,  and  she  thoroughly 
appreciated  it ;  but  the  thing  that  strikes  any 
one  coming  to  her  from  Boswell  is  the  per- 
petual recurrence  of  such  phrases  as  "  Dr. 
Johnson  was  gaily  sociable,"  "  Dr.  Johnson 
Was  in  high  spirits,  full  of  mirth  and  sport," 
'*  Dr.    Johnson   was   in   exceeding   humour.'' 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER        131 

On  one  day  in  1778  he  appears  in  her  journal 
as  "  so  facetious  that  he  challenged  Mr.  Thrale 
to  get  drunk  " ;  and  the  next  year,  when  he 
was  seventy,  she  writes  that  he  "  has  more  fun 
and  comical  humour  and  love  of  nonsense 
about  him  than  almost  anybody  I  ever  saw." 
Even  in  1783,  after  he  had  had  the  stroke 
which  was  the  beginning  of  the  end,  she  speaks 
of  his  "  gaiety."  The  explanation  is  no 
doubt  partly  that  Miss  Burney  was  a  woman 
and  saw  him  chiefly  with  women,  Boswell  a 
man  who  saw  him  chiefly  with  men.  Even 
without  her  genius  she  would  not  be  the  first 
young  woman  whose  admiring  affection  has 
seemed  to  an  old  man  to  give  him  back  his 
youth.  And  she  had  not  only  her  own  sudden 
and  surprising  celebrity  but  all  that  happy 
ease  of  the  Streatham  life,  and  the  cleverness 
and  good  humour  of  Mrs.  Thrale,  to  help  her. 
No  wonder  Johnson  was  at  his  brightest  in 
such  circumstances. 

But  his  easy  sociability  there  was  no  sudden 
revolution  in  his  nature.  Sir  John  Hawkins, 
who,  though  never  a  very  congenial  com- 
panion, had  known  him  longer  than  almost 
any  of  his  friends,  says  of  him  that  he  was 
"  a  great  contributor  to  the  mirth  of  conversa- 
tion." And  constant  glimpses  of  his  lighter 
side  are  caught  all  through  Boswell,  such  as 
that  picture  of  him  at  Corrichatachin,  in  Skye, 

12 


132    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

sitting  with  a  young  Highland  lady  on  his 
knee  and  kissing  her.  We  have  already 
heard  his  peals  of  midnight  laughter  ringing 
through  the  silent  Strand.  The  truth  is  that 
both  by  nature  and  by  principle  he  was  a 
very  sociable  man.  That  is  another  of  the 
elements  in  his  permanent  popularity.  The 
man  who  liked  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men 
when  he  was  alive  has  one  of  the  surest  pass- 
ports to  the  friendliness  of  posterity.  John- 
son, like  Walter  Scott,  could  and  did  talk  to 
everybody,  or,  rather,  join  in  any  talk  that 
anybody  started;  for  he  seldom  spoke  first 
even  among  his  friends.  It  was  probably 
to  this  ease  of  intercourse  that  he  owed  the 
stores  of  information  with  which  he  often  sur- 
prised his  hearers  on  all  sorts  of  unlikely 
subjects,  such  as  on  one  occasion  that  of 
the  various  purposes  to  which  bones  picked 
up  in  the  streets  by  the  London  poor  are  put, 
and  the  use  of  a  particular  paste  in  melting 
iron.  But  in  these  casual  conversations  he 
was  not  consciously  seeking  information  as 
Scott  partly  was ;  he  was  just  giving  play  to 
his  natural  sociability,  or  perhaps  deliberately 
acting  on  the  principle  of  humani  nihil,  which 
no  one  ever  held  more  strongly  than  he. 

He  always  condemned  the  cold  reserve  so 
common  among  Englishmen.  Two  strangers 
of  any  other  nation,  he  used  to  say,  will  find 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER         133 

some  topic  of  talk  at  once  when  they  are 
thrown  into  an  inn  parlour  together  :  two 
Englishmen  will  go  each  to  a  different  window 
and  remain  in  obstinate  silence.  "  Sir,  we  as 
yet  do  not  enough  understand  the  common 
rights  of  humanity."  He  boasted  that  he 
was  never  strange  in  a  strange  place,  and 
would  talk  at  his  best  in  a  coach  with  perfect 
strangers  to  their  outspoken  amazement  and 
delight.  At  all  times  he  hated  and  dreaded 
being  alone,  both  on  moral  and  medical 
grounds,  having  the  fear  of  madness  always 
before  him.  He  said  that  he  had  only  once 
refused  to  dine  out  for  the  sake  of  his  studies, 
and  then  he  had  done  nothing.  He  praised 
a  tavern  chair  as  the  throne  of  human  felicity, 
better  indeed,  because  freer,  than  anything 
to  be  found  at  a  private  house ;  for  only  "  a 
very  impudent  dog  indeed  can  freely  command 
what  is  in  another  man's  house."  He  loved 
to  assert  that  all  great  kings  (among  whom  he 
curiously  included  Charles  II,  "  the  last  King 
of  England  who  was  a  man  of  parts  ")  had  been 
social  men;  and  he  was  the  most  convinced 
of  Londoners  because  it  was  in  London  that 
life,  which  to  him  meant  the  exercise  of  the 
social  and  intellectual  faculties,  was  to  be 
found  at  its  eagerest  and  fullest.  If,  as  Mrs. 
Thrale  said,  all  he  asked  for  happiness  was 
conversation  it  must  be  admitted  that  his 


134    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

standard  was  exacting  both  in  quantity  and 
quality.  He  never  wanted  to  go  to  bed,  and 
if  any  one  would  stay  with  him,  would  sit 
talking  and  drinking  tea  till  four  in  the 
morning.  Yet  his  instantaneous  severity  in 
reproving  inaccuracies  or  refuting  fallacies 
was  so  alarming  that  he  sometimes  reduced 
a  whole  company  to  the  silence  of  fear.  The 
last  thing  he  wished,  no  doubt,  but  it  is  one  of 
the  tragedies  of  life  that  power  will  not  be 
denied  its  exercise,  even  to  its  own  misery. 
But  these  were  the  rare  dark  moments ;  as 
a  rule,  as  we  have  seen,  all  who  came  into  a 
room  with  him  were  entranced  by  the  force, 
variety  and  brilliance  of  his  talk. 

His  natural  turn  was  to  be  the  very  opposite 
of  a  killjoy;  he  loved  not  merely  to  be  kind 
to  others  but  to  be  "  merry  "  with  them,  Mrs. 
Thrale  tells  us  :  loved  to  join  in  children's 
games,  especially  those  of  a  "  knot  of  little 
misses,"  of  whom  he  was  fonder  than  of  boys  : 
and  always  encouraged  cards,  dancing  and 
similar  amusements.  He  was  by  tempera- 
ment and  conviction  a  conformer  to  the 
innocent  ways  of  the  world  :  and  once,  when 
some  Quaker  was  denouncing  the  vanities  of 
dress,  he  broke  out,  "  Oh,  let  us  not  be  found 
when  our  Master  calls  us,  ripping  the  lace  off 
our  waistcoats,  but  the  spirit  of  contention 
from  our  souls  and  tongues  !  .  .  .  Alas,  sir. 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         135 

a  man  who  cannot  get  to  heaven  in  a  green 
coat  will  not  find  his  way  thither  the  sooner 
in  a  grey  one."  Though  he  practised  some 
severities,  such  as  fasting,  himself,  he  was 
altogether  opposed  to  an  austere  view  of  life  : 
was  no  friend,  he  said,  to  making  religion 
appear  too  hard,  by  which  he  thought  many 
good  people  had  done  harm.  Though  he 
walked  with  enthusiastic  reverence  on  any 
ground  trodden  by  saints  or  hermits,  yet  he 
was  quite  clear  that  retirement  from  the  world 
was  for  ordinary  men  and  women  both  a 
mistake  and  a  crime;  and  he  regarded  with 
special  distrust  all  "  youthful  passion  for 
abstracted  devotion."  The  Carthusian  silence 
was,  of  course,  particularly  obnoxious  to  the 
master  and  lover  of  talk.  "  We  read  in  the 
Gospel,"  he  said,  "  of  the  apostles  being  sent 
to  preach,  but  not  to  hold  their  tongues." 
We  all  like  to  find  reasons  of  religion  or  philo- 
sophy in  justification  of  our  own  pleasures  : 
and  no  doubt  one  hears  the  personal  prejudices 
of  the  lover  of  society  as  well  as  the  serious 
thought  of  the  student  of  life  in  the  warmth 
with  which  he  denounces  solitude  as  "  danger- 
ous to  reason  without  being  favourable  to 
virtue,"  and  declares  that  "  the  solitary  mortal 
is  certainly  luxurious,  probably  superstitious, 
and  possibly  mad." 

But  real  as  the  social  element  in  Johnson 


136    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

was,  and  important  as  the  remembrance  of 
it  is  for  a  corrective  of  the  too  solemn  portrait 
of  him  for  which  Boswell  gives  some  excuse, 
it   never   got   the   mastery   of  him.     In  the 
ordinary  way  the  hfe  of  the  pre-eminently 
social   man   or  woman   gradually  disappears 
in   a   dancing   sunshine    of   sociability.     The 
butterfly  finds  crossing  and  recrossing  other 
butterflies  in  the  airy,  flowery  spaces  of  the 
world  such  a  pleasant  business  that  it  asks 
no  more  :    above  all,  it  does  not  care  to  ask 
the  meaning  of  a  thing  so  easy  and  agreeable 
as  day  to  day  existence.     The  pleasures  and 
the   business   that   lie   on   life's   surface,   the 
acquaintances    and    half    friends    that    are 
encountered  there,  are  enough  for  it :    and 
the  crowded  empty  days  glide  by  as  easily 
and  as  imperceptibly  as  a  boatful  of  dreaming 
idlers    drifting    on    unawares    till    the    pace 
suddenly  quickens  for  a  moment,  and  ahnost 
before    the    speed    wakens    them    they    are 
strugghng  hopelessly  in  the  whirlpool  at  the 
bottom  of  the  fall.     But,  for  Johnson,  society 
had  no  sleeping  potion  strong  enough  to  over- 
come his  ever-wakeful  sense  of  the  issues  of 
life.     Underneath  all  the  "  gaiety  "  that  Miss 
Bumey  liked  to  record,  there  was  one  of  the 
gravest  of  men,  a  man  whose  religion  had  a 
strong  "  Day  of  Judgment  "  element  in  it, 
who  believed  as  literally  as  Bunyan  m  heaven 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         137 

and  hell  as  the  alternative  issues  of  life,  except 
that  he  allowed  himself  some  Catholic  latitude 
of  hope  as  to  that  third  possibility  which 
provides  the  most  human  of  the  three  divisions 
of  Dante's  great  poem.  Most  people,  even 
the  most  strictly  orthodox,  would  now  say 
that  Johnson's  religion  contained  too  much 
consciousness  of  the  Divine  Judgment  and 
too  little  of  the  Divine  Love.  But  at  least 
the  fear  of  God,  which  was  to  him  a  thing  so 
real  and  awful,  had  nothing  in  it  of  the 
attitude,  so  common  in  all  ages  and  all  religions 
of  the  world,  which  attempts  to  delude  or 
defeat  or  buy  off  the  hostility  of  a  capricious 
despot  by  means  of  money,  or  magical  arts, 
or  a  well  devised  system  of  celestial  alliances. 
In  Johnson  it  came  simply  from  the  sense  of 
sin  and  issued  in  the  desire  to  live  better.  He 
was  as  ethically  minded  as  any  one  in  that 
moralizing  century  :  only  that  he  added  to 
ethics  the  faith  in  God  and  conviction  of  sin 
which  have  a  power  on  life  unknown  to  m.ere 
moral  philosophy.  He  lived  among  good 
men,  mainly,  but  men,  for  the  most  part, 
whose  intellectual  attitude  towards  the  Chris- 
tian faith  was  one  of  detachment,  indifference, 
or  conventional  acquiescence.  That  could 
not  be  his  attitude.  He  was  the  last  man  in 
the  world  to  be  content  with  anything 
nebulous.     The   active   exercise   of   thinking 


138    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

was  to  him  a  pleasure  in  all  matters,  and  in 
things  important  a  duty  as  well.  He  was 
certain  not  to  avoid  it  in  the  most  important 
question  of  all.  He  might  have  been  either 
Hume  or  Butler,  either  .Wesley  or  Gibbon, 
but  he  was  certain  not  to  be,  what  the  average 
cultivated  man  in  his  day  was,  a  respectable 
but  unenthusiastic  and  unconvinced  con- 
former.  Conventional  acquiescence  is  easy 
provided  a  man  does  not  choose  to  think  or 
inquire ;  but,  as  Carlyle  said,  that  would  not 
do  for  Johnson :  he  always  zealously  recom- 
mended and  practised  inquiry.  The  result 
was  what  is  well  known.  His  mind  settled 
definitely  on  the  opposite  side  tp  Hume  and 
^  Gibbon  :  the  Christian  religion  became  in- 
^  tensely  real  to^  hirn,"T6met lines","  it '  almost 
seems,„the  nightmare  of  his  lifcj  often  its 
comfort  and  strength,  present,  at  any  rate, 
audibly  and  visibly,  in  every  company  where 
he  was ;  for  no  man  was  ever  so  little  ashamed 
of  his  religion  as  Johnson.  It  was  the  prin- 
ciple of  his  life  in  public  as  well  as  in  private. 
Hence  that  spectacle  which  Carlyle  found  so 
memorable,  of  "  Samuel  Johnson,  in  the  era 
of  Voltaire  able  to  purify  and  fortify  his  soul, 
and  hold  real  Communion  with  the  Highest, 
in  the  Church  of  St.  Clement  Danes ;  a  thing 
to  be  looked  at  with  pity,  admiration,  awe." 
That  church  still  remains ;  the  least  altered. 


c 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         139 

perhaps,  with  the  possible  exception  of  the 
house  in  Gough  Square,  of  all  the  buildings 
which  once  had  the  body  of  Johnson  inside 
them;  a  place  of  pilgrimage  for  many  John- 
sonians who,  refusing  to  be  driven  away  by 
the  commonplace  window  which  officially 
honours  his  memory,  are  grateful  to  find  the 
seat  he  used  to  occupy  marked  out  for  their 
veneration  :  and  not  altogether  ungrateful  even 
for  the  amateur  statue  which  stands  in  the 
churchyard,  looking  towards  his  beloved  Fleet 
Street.  There  were  performed  the  central 
acts  of  those  half  tragic  Good  Fridays,  those 
self-condemning  Easter  Days,  recorded  in 
his  private  note-books  :  there,  on  the  Good 
Friday  of  1773,  he  took  Boswell  with  him,  and 
Boswell  observed,  what  he  said  he  should 
never  forget,  "  the  tremulous  earnestness  with 
which  Johnson  pronounced  the  awful  petition 
in  the  Litany  :  '  In  the  hour  of  death,  and  at 
the  day  of  judgment,  good  Lord  deliver  us.'  " 
We  now  know  more  in  some  ways  about 
his  religious  life  than  his  friends  did,  because 
we  have  the  private  prayers  he  wrote  for  his 
own  use,  the  sermons  he  composed  for  others, 
and  a  few  notes,  chiefly  of  a  religious  kind, 
describing  his  doings  and  feelings  on  certain 
days  of  his  life.  But  all  the  evidence,  pri- 
vate and  public,  points  the  same  way.  His 
prayers  are  among  the  best  in  English,  pulsing 


140    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

and  throbbing  with  earnest  faith  and  fear, 
yet  entirely  free  from  the  luscious  sentimen- 
tality of  so  many  modern  religious  composi- 
tions. He  was  in  the  habit  of  making  special 
prayers  for  all  important  occasions  :  he  made 
them,  for  instance,  sometimes  before  he 
entered  upon  new  literary  undertakings,  as 
in  the  case  of  The  Rambler;  and  he  took 
Boswell  into  the  Church  at  Harwich  and 
prayed  with  him  before  he  saw  him  off  for 
Utrecht.  No  one  who  was  with  him  on  such 
occasions  failed  to  be  impressed  by  his  pro- 
found and  awe  -  inspiring  sincerity.  Mrs. 
Thrale  says  that  when  he  repeated  the  Dies 
Irae  "  he  never  could  pass  the  stanza  ending 
Tantus  labor  non  sit  cassus  without  bursting 
into  a  flood  of  tears  " ;  and  another  witness 
records  how  one  night  at  a  dinner  where 
some  one  quoted  the  nineteenth  psalm  his 
worn  and  harsh  features  were  transformed, 
and  "  his  face  was  almost  as  if  it  had  been 
the  face  of  an  angel  "  as  he  recited  Addison's 
noble  version  of  that  psalm.  Phrases  that 
came  unbidden  to  his  voice  or  pen  show  the 
same  constant  sense  of  this  life  as  a  thing  to 
be  lived  in  the  sight  and  presence  of  Eternity. 
When  at  Boswell's  request  he  sends  him  a 
letter  of  advice,  one  of  his  sentences  is  "  I 
am  now  writing,  and  you,  when  you  read  this, 
are  reading,  under  the  Eye  of  Omnipresence." 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         141 

So  on  one  occasion  he  said,  "  The  better  a 
man  is,  the  more  afraid  he  is  of  death,  having 
a  clearer  view  of  infinite  purity  " ;  and  he 
would  quote  Law's  remark  that  "  every  man 
knows  something  worse  of  himself  than  he 
is  sure  of  in  others."  Such  sayings  do  not 
come  to  the  lips  of  men  to  whom  the  life  of  the 
spirit  and  the  conscience  is  not  a  daily  and 
hourly  reality.  That  it  was  to  Johnson ;  and 
no  one  understands  him  who  does  not  lay 
stress  on  it.  It  does  not  always  appear  in 
such  grave  guise  as  in  these  instances,  but  it 
is  always  there.  We  may  take  our  leave  of 
it  as  we  see  it  in  simpler  and  happier  shape  in 
Boswell's  account  of  himself  and  Johnson 
sharing  a  bedroom  at  Glen  Morrison.  "  After 
we  had  offered  up  our  private  devotions  and 
had  chatted  a  little  from  our  beds.  Dr.  Johnson 
said  '  God  bless  us  both  for  Jesus  Christ's 
sake  !  Good-night.'  I  pronounced  '  Amen.' 
He  fell  asleep  immediately." 

A  serious  conviction  held  by  a  human  being 
is  generally  found  to  be  an  inner  citadel 
surrounded  by  a  network  of  prejudices.  It 
was  only  Johnson's  intimate  friends  who  were 
admitted  into  the  central  fortress  of  his  faith : 
the  rest  of  the  world  saw  it  plainly  indeed, 
but  did  not  get  nearer  than  the  girdle  of  de- 
fensive prejudices  outside,  and  to  them  they 


142    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

often  got  nearer  than  they  liked.  Whether 
people  discovered  that  Johnson  was  a  Chris- 
tian or  not,  they  were  quite  certain  to  discover 
that  he  was  a  Churchman.  His  High  Church 
and  Tory  guns  were  always  ready  for  action, 
and  Lord  Auchinleck  is  perhaps  the  only 
recorded  assailant  who  succeeded  in  silencing 
them.  The  praise  he  gave  to  the  dearest  of 
his  friends,  "  He  hated  a  fool,  he  hated  a 
rogue,  and  he  hated  a  Whig  ;  he  was  a  very 
good  hater,"  was  exactly  applicable  to  himself. 
For  us  the  word  Whig  has  come  to  mean  a 
dignified  aristocrat  who,  by  the  pressure  of 
family  tradition,  maintains  a  painful  associa- 
tion with  vulgar  Radicals  :  for  Johnson  it 
meant  a  rebel  against  the  principle  of  au- 
thority. From  that  point  of  view  he  was 
accustomed  to  say  with  perfect  justice  that 
the  first  Whig  was  the  Devil.  His  sallies  at 
the  general  expense  of' the  enemies  of  "  Church 
and  King  "  must  not  be  confused  with  those 
on  many  other  subjects,  as,  for  instance,  on 
the  Scotch,  which  were  partly  humorous  in 
intention  as  well  as  in  expression.  He 
trounced  the  Scotch  to  annoy  Boswell  and 
amuse  himself.  He  trounced  Whigs,  Quakers 
and  Presbyterians  because  he  loved  authority 
both  in  Church  and  State.  These  latter  out- 
bursts represented  definite  opinions  which 
were  held,  as  usually  happens,  with  all  the 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         143 

more  passion  because  reason  had  not  been 
allowed  to  play  her  full  part  in  their  maturing. 
Johnson  could  hold  no  views  to  which  he  had 
not  been  able  to  supply  a  rational  foundation  : 
but  in  these  matters  passion  had  been  given  a 
free  hand  in  the  superstructure. 

In  this  way  his  Tory  outbursts  have  a  smack 
of  life  about  them  not  always  to  be  found  in 
the  utterances  of  sages.  High  Tories  were 
not  often  seen  in  the  intellectual  London 
world  of  these  days  :  they  were  to  be  found 
rather  in  country  parsonages  and  college 
common-rooms.  In  London  Whiggery  sat 
enthroned  and  complacent.  It  is,  therefore, 
with  a  pleasant  sense  of  the  fluttering  of  WTiig 
dovecotes  that  we  watch  Johnson,  always, 
as  Miss  Burney  said,  the  first  man  in  any 
company  in  which  he  appeared,  startling 
superior  persons  by  taking  the  high  Tory  tone. 
He  once  astonished  an  old  gentleman  to  whose 
niece  he  was  talking  by  saying  to  her,  "  My 
dear,  I  hope  you  are  a  Jacobite  " ;  and  an- 
swered the  uncle's  protest  by  saying,  "  Why, 
sir,  I  meant  no  offence  to  your  niece,  I  meant 
her  a  great  compliment.  A  Jacobite,  sir, 
believes  in  the  divine  right  of  kings.  He  that 
believes  in  the  divine  right  of  kings  believes 
in  a  Divinity.  A  Jacobite  believes  in  the 
divine  right  of  Bishops.  He  that  believes  in 
the  divine  right  of   Bishops  believes  in  the 


144    DR.   JOHNSON   AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

divine    authority    of    the    Chi'istian    rehgion. 
Therefore,  sir,  a  Jacobite  is  neither  an  Atheist 
nor  a  Deist.     That  cannot  be  said  of  a  Whig  •. 
for  Whiggism  is  a  negation  of  all  principle:' 
But  it  was  not  often  that  his  Toryism  expressed 
itself  in  an>i:hing  so  hke  a  chain  of  reasoning 
as  this.     As  a  rule,  it  appears  rather  in  those 
conversational    sallies,     so    pleasantly    com- 
pounded of   wrath,   humour,   and  contempt, 
which  are  the  most  remembered  thing  about 
him.     It  provides  some  of  the  most  character- 
istic; as  the  dry  answer  to  Boswell  who  ex- 
pressed his  surprise  at  having  met  a  Stafford- 
shire Whig,  a  being  whom  he  had  not  supposed 
to  exist,  "  Sir,  there  are  rascals  in  all  coun- 
tries " ;    or  the  answer  Garrick  got  when  he 
asked  him  "  Why  did  not  you  make  me  a 
Tory,   when  we   lived  so   much  together  ? 
"  Wliy  "  said  Johnson,  pulling  a  heap  of  half- 
pence from  his  pocket,   "did  not  the  King 
make   these   guineas?"     Or  the   true   story 
he  liked  to  tell  of  Boswell  who,  he  said,      in 
the  year  1745  was  a  fine  boy,  wore  a  white 
cockade,  and  prayed  for  King  James,  till  one 
of  his  uncles  gave  him  a  shilling  on  condition 
that  he  should  pray  for  King  George,  which 
he  accordingly  did.     So  you  see  that  Whigs 
of  all  ages  are  made  the  same  way.       In  the 
same  vein  is  his  pleasant  good-bye  to  Burke 
at  Beaconsfield  before  the  election  of  1774, 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER        145 

*'  Farewell,  my  dear  sir,  I  wish  you  all  the 
success  which  can  possibly  be  wished  you — 
by  an  honest  man."  Even  the  fiercer  outburst 
about  Patriotism  (that  is  according  to  the 
m.eaning  of  the  word  in  those  days,  the  pre- 
tence of  preferring  the  interests  of  the  people 
to  those  of  the  Crown),  "  Patriotism  is  the 
last  refuge  of  a  scoundrel,"  takes  for  us  an 
added  piquancy  from  the  fact  that  Charles 
Fox,  already  a  "  patriot,"  and  soon  to  be  the 
greatest  of  all,  was  in  the  Chair  at  "  The  Club  " 
on  the  night  when  it  was  uttered. 

But  as  a  rule  the  fiercest  assaults  were 
reserved  for  Presbyterians  and  Dissenters 
in  whom  political  and  ecclesiastical  iniquity 
were  united.  When  he  was  walking  in  the 
ruins  of  St.  Andrews  and  some  one  asked 
where  John  Knox  was  buried,  he  broke  out 
"  I  hope  in  the  highway.  I  have  been  looking 
at  his  reformations."  And  he  wished  a 
dangerous  steeple  not  to  be  taken  down, 
"  for,"  said  he,  "  it  may  fall  on  some  of  the 
posterity  of  John  Kjiox  :  and  no  great 
matter  !  "  So  when  he  and  Bos  well  went  to 
the  Episcopal  church  at  Montrose  he  gave  "  a 
shilling  extraordinary  "  to  the  Clerk,  saying, 
"  He  belongs  to  an  honest  church,"  and  when 
Boswell  rashly  reminded  him  that  Episco- 
palians were  only  dissenters,  that  is,  only 
tolerated,  in  Scotland,  he  brought  down  upon 


146    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

himself  the  crushing  retort,  "  Sir,  we  are  here 
as  Christians  in  Turkey."  These  ingeniously 
exact  analogies  were  always  a  favourite 
weapon  with  him;  and  perhaps  the  most 
brilliant  of  them  all  is  one  he  used  on  this  same 
subject  in  reply  to  Robertson,  who  said  to  him 
in  London,  "Dr.  Johnson,  allow  me  to  say 
that  in  one  respect  I  have  the  advantage  of 
you ;  when  you  were  in  Scotland  you  would 
not  come  to  hear  any  of  our  preachers,  where- 
as, when  I  am  here,  I  attend  your  public 
worship  without  scruple,  and,  indeed,  with 
great  satisfaction."  "  ^Vhy,  sir,"  said  John- 
son, "  that  is  not  so  extraordinary  :  the  King 
of  Siam  sent  ambassadors  to  Louis  the  Four- 
teenth :  but  Louis  the  Fourteenth  sent  none 
to  the  King  of  Siam."  This  topic  also  enjoys 
another  distinction.  It  is  one  of  many  proofs 
of  the  superlative  excellence  of  Johnson's 
talk  that  it  cannot  be  imitated.  Hundreds 
of  clever  men  have  made  the  attempt,  but, 
with  the  exception  of  a  single  sentence,  not 
one  of  these  manufactured  utterances  could 
impose  for  an  instant  upon  a  real  Johnsonian. 
That  single  exception  deals  with  this  same 
anti-Presbyterian  prejudice.  It  is  variously 
asscribed  to  Thorold  Rogers  and  to  Birkbeck 
HiU,  the  most  Johnsonian  of  all  men.  It 
supposes  that  Boswell  and  Johnson  are 
walking  in  Oxford,  and  Boswell,  endowed  with 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         147 

the  gift  of  prophecy,  asks  Johnson  what  he 
would  say  if  he  were  told  that  a  hundred 
years  after  his  death  the  Oxford  University 
Press  would  allow  his  Dictionary  to  be 
re-edited  by  a  Scotch  Presbyterian.  "  Sir," 
replies  Johnson,  "to  be  facetious  it  is  not 
necessary  to  be  indecent."  Here  and  here 
alone  is  something  which  might  deceive  the 
very  elect. 

In  several  of  these  last  utterances  the  bias 
is  as  much  anti-Scotch  as  anti-Presbyterian. 
Of  course  Johnson,  as  his  Journey  to  the 
Western  Islands  amply  proves,  had  no  serious 
feeling  against  Scotchmen  as  Scotchmen  like 
the  settled  convictions  which  made  him  dis- 
like Presbyterians.  But  then,  as  always, 
the  Scot  had  a  specially  "  gude  conceit  "  of 
himself  and  a  clannish  habit  of  pushing  the 
interest  of  his  brother  Scots  wherever  he  went, 
so  that  it  was  commonly  thought  that  to  let 
a  Scot  into  your  house  or  business  was  not 
only  to  let  in  one  conceited  fellow,  but  to  be 
certain  of  half  a  dozen  more  to  follow.  The 
English  were  then  still  so  far  from  their  present 
admiring  acceptance  of  Scotsmen  as  their 
ordinary  rulers  in  Church  and  State  that 
they  had  not  even  begun  to  think  of  them  as 
their  equals.  Scotland  was  at  that  time  a 
very  poor  country,  and  the  poor  relation  has 

K  2 


148    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

never  been  a  popular  character  an5rw'here. 
Consequently  Englishmen — ^and  who  was  ever 
more  English  than  Johnson  ? — commonly  saw 
in  the  newly  arrived  Scot  a  pauper  and  an 
upstart  come  to  live  upon  his  betters  :  and 
they  revenged  themselves  in  the  manner 
natural  to  rich  relations.  To  Johnson's 
tongue,  too,  the  Scots  offered  the  important 
additional  temptations  of  being  often  Whigs, 
oftener  still  Presbyterians,  and  always  the 
countrymen  of  Boswell.  This  last  was  prob- 
ably the  one  which  he  found  it  most  impossible 
to  resist.  Happily  Boswell  had  the  almost 
unique  good  sense  to  enjoy  a  good  thing  even 
at  the  expense  of  his  country  or  himself.  It 
is  to  him,  or  perhaps  at  him,  that  the  majority 
of  these  Scotch  witticisms  were  uttered  :  it 
is  by  him  that  nearly  all  of  them  are  recorded, 
from  the  original  sally  which  was  the  first 
sentence  he  heard  from  Johnson's  lips,  in 
reply  to  his  "  ]VIr.  Johnson,  I  do  indeed  come 
from  Scotland,  but  I  cannot  help  it."  "  That, 
sir,  I  find,  is  what  a  very  great  many  of  your 
countrjmien  cannot  help  " — ^to  the  famous 
reply  at  the  Wilkes  dinner,  when  some  one 
said  "  Poor  old  England  is  lost," — "  Sir,  it 
is  not  so  much  to  be  lamented  that  old 
England  is  lost  as  that  the  Scotch  have  found 
it." 

On  this  topic   Johnson   would  always  let 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         149 

himself  go.  Again  and  again  the  generous 
connoisseurship  of  Boswell  describes  not  only 
the  witticism  but  the  joyous  gusto  with  which 
it  was  uttered.  On  no  subject  is  the  great 
talker's  amazing  ingeniousness  of  retort  more 
conspicuous.  When  Boswell  most  justly  criti- 
cized the  absurd  extravagance  of  his  famous 
sentence  about  the  death  of  Garrick  eclipsing 
the  gaiety  of  nations,  Johnson  replied,  "  I 
could  not  have  said  more  nor  less.  It  is  the 
truth ;  eclipsed,  not  extinguished ;  and  his 
death  did  eclipse;  it  was  like  a  storm.'* 
Boswell.  "  But  why  nations  ?  Did  his  gaiety 
extend  further  than  his  own  nation  ? " 
Johnson.  "  Why,  sir,  some  exaggeration  must 
be  allowed.  Besides  nations  may  be  said — ■ 
if  we  allow  the  Scotch  to  be  a  nation,  and  to 
have  gaiety — which  they  have  not."  So 
when  Johnson  said  the  Scotch  had  none  of 
the  luxuries  or  conveniences  of  life  before  the 
Union,  and  added,  "  laughing,"  says  Boswell, 
*'  with  as  much  glee  as  if  Monboddo  had  been 
present,"  "  We  have  taught  you  and  we'll 
do  the  same  in  time  to  all  barbarous  nations — 
to  the  Cherokees — and  at  last  to  the  Ourang- 
outangs,"  Boswell  tried  to  meet  him  by 
saying  "  We  had  wine  before  the  Union." 
But  this  only  got  him  into  worse  trouble. 
"  No,  sir,  you  had  some  weak  stuff,  the  refuse 
of  France,  which  would  not  make  you  drunk.'- 


150    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

Boswell.  "  I  assure  you,  sir,  there  was  a 
great  deal  of  drunkenness."  Johnson.  "  No, 
sir;  there  were  people  who  died  of  dropsies 
which  they  contracted  in  trying  to  get 
drunk."  This  was  said  as  they  sailed  along 
the  shores  of  Skye ;  and  of  course  the  whole 
tour  in  Scotland  afforded  many  opportunities 
for  such  jests.  There  was  the  wall  at  Edin- 
burgh which  by  tradition  w^as  to  fall  upon  some 
very  learned  man,  but  had  been  taken  down 
some  time  before  Johnson's  visit :  "  They  have 
been  afraid  it  never  would  fall,"  said  he. 
There  was  St.  Giles's  at  Edinburgh,  which 
provoked  the  chaffing  aside  to  Robertson, 
"  Come,  let  me  see  what  was  once  a  church." 
There  were  the  beauties  of  Glasgow  of  which 
Adam  Smith  boasted,  and  provoked  the 
famous  question  "  Pray,  sir,  have  you  ever 
seen  Brentford  ?  "  There  was  the  supposed 
treelessness  of  Scotland,  on  which  he  dwells 
in  the  Journey,  and  which  once  led  him  to 
question  whether  there  was  a  tree  between 
Edinburgh  and  the  English  border  older  than 
himself ;  and  to  reply  to  Boswell's  suggestion 
that  he  ought  to  be  whipped  at  every  tree 
over  100  years  old  in  that  space,  "  I  believe 
I  might  submit  to  it  for  a  baubee  !  "  It  led 
also  to  the  pleasantry  in  which  he  emphasized 
his  conviction  that  the  oak  stick  he  had 
brought   from   London   was   stolen   and   not 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER         151 

merely  lost  when  it  disappeared  in  Mull; 
"  Consider,  sir,  the  value  of  such  a  piece  of 
Umber  here." 

To-day  we  think  of  Scotland  as  one  of  the 
most  beautiful  countries  in  the  world  and  go 
there  in  thousands  for  that  reason.  But  that 
was  not  why  Johnson  went.  He  had  little 
pleasure  in  any  landscape  scenery,  and  none 
in  that  of  moors  and  mountains.  Indeed 
nobody  had  in  those  days  except  Gray.  And 
Gray  was  the  last  man  in  whose  company 
Johnson  was  likely  to  be  found  differing  from 
his  contemporaries.  So  that  though  he  saw 
much  of  what  is  finest  in  the  noble  scenery 
of  Scotland,  it  hardly  drew  from  him  a  single 
word  of  wonder  or  delight  :  and  his  only 
remembered  allusion  to  it  is  the  well-known 
sally  hurled  ten  years  earlier  at  the  Scotsman 
in  London  who  thought  to  get  on  safe  ground 
for  the  defence  of  his  country  by  speaking 
of  her  "  noble  wild  prospects,"  but  only  drew 
upon  himself  the  answer,  "  I  believe,  sir,  you 
have  a  great  many.  Norway,  too,  has  noble 
wild  prospects ;  and  Lapland  is  remarkable  for 
prodigious  noble  wild  prospects.  But,  sir,  let 
me  tell  you,  the  noblest  prospect  which  a 
Scotchman  ever  sees  is  the  high  road  that 
leads  him  to  London  !  " 

So  dangerous  it  always  was  to  put  a  phrase 
into  Johnson's  mouth  !     So  dangerous  above 


152    DR.   JOHNSON   AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

all  to  try  to  make  him  prefer  anything  to  his 
beloved  London.     Perhaps  no  nation  in  the 
world  has  cared  so  little  about  its  capital  city 
as  the  English.     When  one  thinks  of  the  pas- 
sionate affection  lavished  on  Athens,  Rome, 
Paris,  even,   strange  as  it   seems  to  us,   on 
Madrid,  one  is  tempted  to  accuse  the  Enghsh 
of  dull  disloyalty  to  their  own  noble  capital 
city.     London   played,    at   any  rate   till   the 
French  Revolution,  a  far  more  important  part 
in  English  life  than  any  other  capital  in  the 
life  of  any  other  country.     In  the  reign  of 
Charles   II,   according   to   Macaulay,   it   was 
seventeen  times  as  large  as  Bristol,  then  the 
second  city  in  the  Kingdom ;  a  relative  position 
unique    in    Europe.     And    all    through    our 
history  it  had  led  the  nation  in  politics  as  well 
as    in    commerce.     Yet    of    the    best    of    all 
tributes  to  greatness,  the  praise  of  great  men, 
it   had   received   singularly   little.     There   is 
Milton's    noble    burst    of    eloquence    in    the 
Areopagitica,  but  that  is  the  praise  not    so 
much  of  London  as  of  the  religion  and  politics 
of  London  at  a  particular  moment.     Spenser's 
beautiful    allusion    in    the    Prothalamion   to 
"  mery  London  my  most  kyndly  nurse  "  and 
to  the  "  sweet  Thames  "  whom  he  invites  to 
"  run  softely  till  I  end  my  song  "  is  among  the 
few  tributes  of  personal  affection  paid  by  our 
poets  to  the  great  city.     And  it  is  still  true 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER         153 

to-day  that  the  tutelary  genius  of  London  is 
none  of  the  great  poets  :  it  is  Samuel  Johnson. 
At  this  moment,  as  these  pages  are  being 
written,  the  railway  stations  of  London  are 
filled  with  picture  advertisements  of  the 
attractions  of  the  great  city.  And  who  is  the 
central  figure  in  the  picture  that  deals  with 
central  London  !  Not  Shakespeare  or  Milton, 
but  Johnson.  The  worn,  rather  sad  face, 
more  familiar  to  Englishmen  than  that  of  any 
other  man  of  letters,  with  the  wig  and  brown 
coat  to  make  recognition  certain,  is  chosen  as 
the  most  useful  for  their  purpose  by  advertisers 
probably  innocent  of  any  literature,  but  astute 
enough  in  knowing  what  will  attract  the 
people. 

Johnson  s  love  of  London,  however,  was  of 
his  own  sort,  quite  unlike  that  of  Charles  Lamb 
for  instance,  or  that  of  such  a  man  as  Sir  Walter 
Besant.  He  cared  nothing  for  architecture, 
and  little  for  history.  Still  less  had  his  feeling 
anything  to  do  with  the  commercial  greatness 
of  London.  He  had  a  scholar's  contempt  for 
traders  as  people  without  ideas  fit  for  rational 
conversation.  The  man  who  scoffed  at  the 
"  boobies  of  Birmingham  "  as  unworthy  of 
notice  in  comparison  with  the  gownsmen  of 
Oxford  or  even  the  cathedral  citizens  of  Lich- 
field, whose  experience  of  commercial  men 
made  him  declare  that  "trade  could  not  be 


154    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

managed  by  those  who  manage  it  if  it  had 
miuch  difficulty,"  was  not  Hkely  to  have  his 
imagination  fired  by  talk  about  London  as  the 
centre  of  the  world's  commerce.  What  he 
cared  about  was  a  very  different  thing.  He 
thought  of  London  as  the  place  in  all  the  world 
where  the  pulse  of  human  life  beat  strongest. 
There  a  man  could  store  his  mind  better  than 
anywhere  else  :  there  he  could  not  only  live 
but  grow  :  there  more  than  anywhere  else  he 
might  escape  the  self-complacency  which  leads 
to  intellectual  and  moral  torpor,  because  there 
he  would  be  certain  to  meet  not  only  with  his 
equals  but  with  his  superiors.  These  were 
grave  grounds  which  he  could  use  in  an  argu- 
ment :  but  a  man  needs  no  arguments  in 
justification  of  the  things  he  likes,  and  Johnson 
liked  London  because  it  was  the  home  of 
the  intellectual  pleasures  which  to  him  were 
the  only  real  pleasures,  and  which  made 
London  for  him  a  heaven  upon  earth.  "  He 
who  is  tired  of  London  is  tired  of  life,"  he  said 
on  one  occasion ;  and  on  another,  when  some 
one  remarked  that  many  people  were  content 
to  live  in  the  country,  he  replied,  "  Sir,  it  is  in 
the  intellectual  as  in  the  physical  world;  we 
are  told  by  natural  philosophers  that  a  body 
is  at  rest  in  the  place  that  is  fit  for  it  :  they 
who  are  content  to  live  in  the  country  are  fit 
for  the  country."     He  was  not  one  of  them  : 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         155 

he  wanted  Charing  Cross  and  its  "  full  tide  of 
human  existence,"  and  thought  that  any  one 
who  had  once  experienced  "  the  full  flow  of 
London  talk "  must,  if  he  retired  to  the 
country,  "  either  be  contented  to  turn  baby 
again  and  play  with  the  rattle,  or  he  will  pine 
away  like  a  great  fish  in  a  little  pond,  and  die 
for  want  of  his  usUal  food."  He  was  more  than 
once  ofiered  good  country  livings  if  he  would 
take  orders,  but  he  knew  that  he  would  find 
the  "  insipidity  and  uniformity  "  of  country 
life  intolerable  :  and  he  stayed  on  to  become 
the  greatest  of  Londoners.  There  is  probably 
to  this  day  no  book,  not  a  professed  piece  of 
topography,  which  mentions  the  names  of  so 
many  London  streets,  squares  and  churches, 
as  Boswell's  Life  of  Johnson.  Many  sights 
that  Johnson  saw  we  can  still  see  exactly  as 
he  saw  them;  many,  of  course,  have  dis- 
appeared; and  many  are  so  utterly  changed 
as  to  be  unrecognizable.  The  young  poet 
may  still  stand  where  he  and  Goldsmith  stood 
in  Poets'  Corner  and  say  in  his  heart  with 
Johnson — 

*'Forsitan   at   nostrum   nomen   miscebitur 

istis." 

But  when  he  goes  on  as  they  did  to 
Temple  Bar,  he  will  find  that  ancient  monu- 
ment retired  into  the  country  and  certainly 


,156    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

nothing  whatever  to  remind  him  of  the  Jaco- 
bite heads  still  mouldering  on  it,  which  gave 
occasion  to  Goldsmith's  witty  turning  of  his 
Tory  friend's  quotation — 

"  Forsitan    et  nostrum  nomen  miscebitur 
ISTIS." 

But  on  that  holy  ground  the  Johnsonian  will 
hardly  miss  even  Temple  Bar.  For  most  of 
Johnson's  haunts  and  homes,  the  Mitre  and 
the  Cock,  the  Churches  of  St.  Clement  and  of 
the  Temple,  his  houses  in  Johnson's  Court  and 
Gough  Square,  are  or  were  all  hard  by  :  and 
the  memory  will  be  far  too  busy  to  allow  room 
for  the  disappointments  and  lamentations  of 
the  eye 

But  of  course  the  great  characteristic  of 
Johnson  is  neither  love  of  London  nor  hatred 
of  Presbyterians,  nor  any  of  the  other  things 
we  have  been  talking  about  :  it  is  the  love 
and  power  of  talk.  We  cannot  estimate  talk 
nearly  as  accurately  as  we  estimate  writing  : 
so  much  that  belongs  to  the  word  spoken  is 
totally  lost  when  it  becomes  a  word  recorded  : 
the  light  in  the  eye,  the  brow  raised  in  scorn 
or  anger,  the  moving  lips  whose  amusement 
or  contempt  is  a  picture  before  it  is  a  sound, 
the  infinitely  varying  weight  and  tone  of  the 
human  voice  :    all  that  is  gone  or  seen  only 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER         157 

very  darkly  through  the  glass  of  description. 
But  since  the  talk  itself  as  written  down  and 
the  manner  of  it  as  described  are  all  we  have 
to  judge  by  :  and  since  as  long  as  we  are  alive 
and  awake  we  cannot  avoid  judging  the  things 
and  people  that  interest  us,  we  inevitably  form 
opinions  about  talkers  as  well  as  about 
writers  :  and  the  best  opinion  of  those  who 
know  English  is  undoubtedly  that  Johnson 
is  the  greatest  of  all  recorded  talkers.  The  best 
of  all  is  very  possibly  some  obscure  genius 
who  caret  vate  sacro  :  but  Johnson  with  the 
invaluable  help  of  Boswell  has  beaten  him 
and  all  the  others.  What  is  the  essence  of 
his  superiority  ?  Not  wisdom  or  profundity 
certainly.  There,  of  course,  he  would  be 
immeasurably  surpassed  by  many  men  of  all 
nations,  notably  by  Socrates,  who  is  probably 
the  most  famous  and  certainly  by  far  the 
most  influential  of  talkers.  Of  course  his 
talk  comes  to  us  chiefly  through  the  medium 
of  a  man  of  transcendent  genius;  and  Plato 
may  have  transcended  his  master  as  well  as 
other  things.  But  on  the  whole  all  the  evi- 
dence goes  to  show  that  the  talk  of  Socrates 
was  the  force  which  set  ideas  in  motion, 
which  modified  the  whole  subsequent  moral 
and  intellectual  life  of  Greece  and  Rome,  and 
through  them  of  the  world ;  in  fact,  that  the 
spoken  word  of  Socrates  has  played  a  greater 


158    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

part  in  the  world  than  any  written  word 
whatsoever,  except  the  Gospels  and  the  Koran, 
both  themselves,  it  may  be  noted,  the  record 
of  a  spoken  word  greater  than  the  written 
book.  Beside  anything  of  this  kind  Johnson 
sinks  of  course  into  entire  insignificance.  But 
as  an  artist  in  talk,  that  is  a  man  who  talked 
well  for  the  pleasure  of  it,  as  an  end  in  itself, 
and  whose  talk  was  heard  gladly  as  a  thing  of 
triumph  and  delight,  bringing  with  it  its  own 
justification,  he  probably  far  surpassed  So- 
crates. If  he,  too,  had  got  to  his  trial  he 
probably  would  have  been  as  scornful  as 
Socrates  of  the  judgment  of  popular  opinion. 
But  he  never  would  have  got  there,  not  only 
because  he  was  too  conservative  to  deny  the 
established  divinities,  but  because  he  was  so 
entertaining  that  everybody  liked  listening 
to  him,  whatever  he  denied  or  affirmed. 
Socrates,  on  the  other  hand,  was  evidently 
something  of  a  bore,  with  a  bore's  unrelieved 
earnestness  and  inopportune  persistence.  His 
saying  about  "  letting  the  talk  lead  us 
where  it  will,"  is  an  exact  description  of 
Johnson's  practice,  but  nothing  could  be  less 
like  his  own.  He  is  always  relentlessly 
guiding  it  towards  a  particular  goal,  from  the 
path  to  which  he  will  not  have  it  for  a  moment 
diverted.  Johnson,  on  the  other  hand,  takes 
no  thought  whatever  for  the  argumentative 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER         159 

morrow,  never  starts  a  subject,  never  sets  out 
to  prove  anything.  He  talks  as  an  artist 
paints,  just  for  the  joy  of  doing  what  he  is 
conscious  of  doing  well.  The  talk,  like  the 
picture,  is  its  own  sufficient  reward. 

The  same  sort  of  inferiority  puts  other 
famous  talkers,  Coleridge  for  instance,  and 
Luther,  below  Johnson.  They  had  too  much 
purpose  in  their  talk  to  be  artists  about  it. 
The  endless  eloquence  of  the  Highgate  days, 
to  say  nothing  about  the  greater  days  before 
Highgate,  was  a  powerful  element  in  that 
revival  of  a  spiritual  or  metaphysical,  as 
opposed  to  a  merely  sensational,  philosophy 
which  has  been  going  on  ever  since.  No  such 
results  can  be  attributed  to  Johnson's  talk. 
But  talk  is  one  thing  and  preaching  another  : 
and  the  final  criticism  on  Coleridge  as  a  talker 
was  given  once  for  all  in  Charles  Lamb's  well- 
known  answer  to  his  friend's  question  :  "  Did 
you  ever  hear  me  preach,  Charles  ?  "  "  Never 
heard  you  do  anything  else."  Luther  again, 
though  much  more  of  a  human  being  than 
Coleridge  and  apparently  a  livelier  talker, 
was,  after  all,  the  leader  of  one  of  the  greatest 
movements  the  world  has  ever  seen,  and  like 
his  disciple,  Johnson's  friend  John  Wesley, 
no  doubt  had  no  time  to  fold  his  legs,  and  have 
his  talk  out.  Besides  leaders  of  movements 
are  necessarily  somewhat  narrow  men.     For 


160    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

them  there  is  only  one  thing  of  importance  in 
the  world,  and  their  talk  inevitably  lacks 
variety.  That,  on  the  other  hand,  is  one  of 
the  three  great  qualities  in  which  Johnson's 
talk  is  supreme.  Without  often  aiming  at 
being  insti*uctive  it  is  not  only  nearly  always 
interesting  but  with  an  amazing  variety  of 
interest.  The  theologian,  the  moral  philo- 
sopher, the  casuist,  the  scholar,  the  politician, 
the  economist,  the  lawyer,  the  clergyman,  the 
schoolmaster,  the  author,  above  all  the 
amateur  of  life,  all  find  in  it  abundance  of  food 
for  their  own  particular  tastes.  Each  of 
them — notably  for  instance,  the  political 
economist — may  sometimes  find  Johnson  mis- 
taken; not  one  will  ever  find  him  dull.  On 
every  subject  he  has  something  to  say  which 
makes  the  reader's  mind  move  faster  than 
before,  if  it  be  but  in  disagreement.  Reynolds, 
who  had  heard  plenty  of  good  talkers,  thought 
no  one  could  ever  have  exceeded  Johnson  in 
the  capacity  of  talking  well  on  any  subject 
that  came  uppermost.  His  mere  knowledge 
and  information  were  prodigious.  If  a 
stranger  heard  him  talk  about  leather  he  would 
imagine  him  to  have  been  bred  a  tanner,  or  if 
about  the  school  philosophy,  he  would  suppose 
he  had  spent  his  life  in  the  study  of  Scotus  and 
Aquinas.  No  doubt  the  variety  was  a  long 
•way    from    universality.     Johnson    was    too 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER  161 

human  for  the  dulness  of  omniscience.  He 
had  his  dislikes  as  well  as  predilections.  The 
least  affected  of  men,  he  particularly  disliked 
the  then  common  fashion  of  dragging  Greek 
and  Roman  history  into  conversation.  He 
said  that  he  "  never  desired  to  hear  of  the  Punic 
War  while  he  lived,"  and  when  Fox  talked 
of  Catiline  he  "  thought  of  Tom  Thumb."  So 
when  Boswell  used  an  illustration  from  Roman 
manners  he  put  him  down  with,  "  Why  we 
know  very  little  about  the  Romans." 

Wide  as  the  country  he  could  cover  was, 
he  is  always  coming  back  to  his  favourite 
topic,  which  can  only  be  described  as  life; 
how  it  is  lived  and  how  it  ought  to  be;  life 
as  a  spectacle  and  life  as  a  moral  and  social 
problem.  That  by  itself  makes  a  sufficiently 
varied  field  for  talk.  But  real  as  his  variety 
was,  it  is  still  not  the  most  remarkable  thing 
about  his  talk.  Where  he  surpassed  all  men 
was  in  the  readiness  with  which  he  could  put 
what  he  possessed  to  use.  Speaking  of  the 
extraordinary  quickness  with  which  he  "  flew 
upon  "  any  argument,  Boswell  once  said  to 
Sir  Joshua,  "  he  has  no  formal  preparation, 
no  flourishing  with  the  sword;  he  is  through 
your  body  in  an  instant."  Sometimes  he 
condescended  to  achieve  this  by  mere  rude- 
ness, as  once  when,  being  hard  pressed  in  an 
argument  about  the  passions,  he  said,  "  Sir, 

L 


162    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

there  is  one  passion  I  advise  you  to  be  careful 
of.  When  you  have  drunk  that  glass  don't 
drink  another."  But  the  notion,  which  one 
hears  occasionally  expressed,  that  his  principal 
argumentative  weapon  was  rudeness  is  an 
entire  mistake.  Every  impartial  reader  of 
Boswell  will  admit  that  the  rudeness  of  his 
retorts  where  it  exists  is  entirely  swallowed 
up  and  forgotten  in  their  aptness,  ingenuity 
and  wit.  He  was  rude  sometimes,  no  doubt ; 
as,  for  instance,  to  the  unfortunate  young  man 
who  went  to  him  for  advice  as  to  whether  he 
should  marry,  and  got  for  an  answer,  "  Sir, 
I  would  advise  no  man  to  marry  who  is  not 
likely  to  propagate  understanding.'*  But, 
human  nature  being  what  it  is,  sympathy  for 
the  victim  is  in  such  cases  commonly  extin- 
guished in  delighted  admiration  of  the  punish- 
ment. That  will  be  still  more  whole-hearted 
when  the  victim  is  obviously  a  bore,  like  the 
gentleman  who  annoyed  Johnson  by  persisting 
in  spite  of  discouragement  in  an  argument 
about  the  future  life  of  brutes,  till  at  last  he 
gave  the  fatal  opportunity  by  asking,  "  with 
a  serious  metaphysical  pensive  face,"  "  But, 
really,  sir,  when  we  see  a  very  sensible  dog, 
we  don't  know  what  to  think  of  him;  "  to 
which  Johnson,  "  rolling  with  joy  at  the 
thought  which  beamed  in  his  eye,"  replied, 
*'  True,  sir,  and  when  we  see  a  very  foolish 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         163 

fellow,  we  don't  know  what  to  think  of  Am." 
Conversation  would  be  a  weariness  of  the  flesh 
if  one  might  never  answer  a  fool  according  to 
his  folly  :  and  such  answers  are  not  to  be 
called  rude  when  the  rudeness,  if  such  there  be, 
is  only  one  ingredient  in  a  compound  of  which 
the  principal  parts  are  humour  and  felicity. 
And,  of  course,  even  this  measure  of  rudeness 
is  only  present  occasionally,  while  the  amazing 
exactness  of  felicity  seldom  fails.  Who  does 
not  envy  the  readiness  of  mind  which  in- 
stantly provided  him  with  the  exact  analogy 
which  he  used  to  crush  Boswell's  plea  for  the 
Methodist  undergraduates  expelled  from 
Oxford  in  1768  ?  "  But  was  it  not  hard,  sir, 
to  expel  them,  for  I  am  told  they  were  good 
beings  ?  "  "I  believe  they  might  be  good 
beings  :  but  they  were  not  fit  to  be  in  the 
University  of  Oxford.  A  cow  is  a  very  good 
animal  in  the  field ;  but  we  turn  her  out  of  a 
garden."  Note  that,  as  usual  with  Johnson, 
— and  that  is  the  astonishing  thing — the 
illustration,  however  far-fetched,  is  not  merely 
humorous  but  exactly  to  the  point.  Plenty 
of  men  can  compose  such  retorts  at  leisure  : 
the  unique  Johnsonian  gift  was  that  he  had 
them  at  his  instant  command.  Or  take  one 
other  illustration;  a  compliment  this  time, 
and  one  of  the  swiftest  as  well  as  happiest 
on  record.     Mrs.  Siddons  came  to  see  him  the 

L2 


164    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

year  before  he  died,  and  when  she  entered  his 
room  there  was  no  chair  for  her.  Another 
man  would  have  been  embarrassed  by  such  a 
circumstance  combined  with  such  a  visitor. 
Not  so  Johnson,  who  turned  the  difficulty 
into  a  triumph  by  simply  saying  with  a  smile, 
"  Madam,  you  who  so  often  occasion  a  want 
of  seats  to  other  people,  will  the  more  readily 
excuse  the  want  of  one  yourself." 

The  third  great  quality  of  Johnson's  talk 
is  its  style.  His  command  of  language  was 
such  as  that  he  seems  never  to  have  been  at  a 
loss ;  never  to  have  fumbled,  or  hesitated,  or 
fallen  back  upon  the  second  best  word;  he 
saw  instantly  the  point  he  wanted  to  make,  and 
was  instantly  ready  with  the  best  words  in 
which  to  make  it.  It  was  said  of  him  that  all 
his  talk  could  be  written  down  and  printed 
without  a  correction.  That  would,  indeed, 
be  double-edged  praise  to  give  to  most  men  : 
but  with  Johnson  it  is  absolutely  true  without 
being  in  the  least  damaging.  For  his  talk 
is  always  talk,  not  writing  or  preaching ;  and 
it  is  always  his  own.  That  dictum  of  Horace 
which  he  and  Wilkes  discussed  at  the  famous 
dinner  at  Dilly's,  Difficile  est  proprie  communia 
dicere,  gives  the  exact  praise  of  Johnson  as  a 
talker.  There  are  few  things  more  difficult 
than  to  put  the  truths  of  common  sense  in 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER        165 

such  a  way  as  to  make  them  your  own.  To  do 
so  is  one  of  the  privileges  of  the  masters  of 
style.  Few  people  have  had  more  of  it  than 
Johnson.  His  prose,  spoken  or  written,  is 
altogether  wanting  in  some  of  the  greatest 
elements  of  style  :  it  has  no  music,  no  mystery, 
no  gift  of  suggestion,  very  little  of  the  higher 
sort  of  imagination,  nothing  at  all  of  what  we 
have  been  taught  to  call  the  Celtic  side  of  the 
English  mind.  But  in  this  particular  power 
of  making  the  old  new,  and  the  commonplace 
individual,  Johnson  is  among  the  great  masters. 
And  he  shows  it  in  his  talk  even  more  than 
in  his  writings.  All  that  he  says  has  that 
supreme  mark  of  style ;  it  cannot  be  translated 
without  loss.  The  only  indisputable  proof 
of  an  author  possessing  style  is  his  being  un- 
quotable except  in  his  own  words.  If  a 
paraphrase  will  do  he  may  have  learning, 
wisdom,  profundity,  what  you  will,  but  style 
he  has  not.  Style  is  the  expression  of  an  indi- 
vidual, appearing  once  and  only  once  in  the 
world ;  it  is  Keats  or  Carlyle  or  Swinburne  :  it 
never  has  been  and  never  will  be  anybody  else. 
Its  presence  in  Johnson  is  painfully  brought 
home  to  any  one  who  tries  to  quote  his  good 
things  without  the  assistance  of  a  very 
accurate  verbal  memory.  Even  when  he 
says  such  a  thing  as  "  This  is  wretched  stuff, 
sir,"  the  words  manage  to  have  style  because 


166    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

they  express  his  convictions  in  a  way  which  is 
his,  and  no  one  else's.  This  is  taking  it  at 
its  lowest,  of  course;  when  we  go  a  little 
further  and  take  a  sentence  like  the  famous 
remark  about  Ossian,  "  Sir,  a  man  might 
write  such  stuff  for  ever  if  he  would  abandon 
his  mind  to  it,"  the  sting  in  the  word  "  aban- 
don "  is  the  sort  of  thing  which  other  people 
devise  at  their  desks,  but  which  Johnson 
has  ready  on  his  lips  for  immediate  use.  So 
again,  he  seems  to  have  been  able  not  only 
to  find  the  most  telling  word  in  a  moment, 
but  to  put  his  thought  in  the  most  telling 
shape.  Many  people  then  and  since  disliked 
and  disapproved  of  Bolingbroke.  But  has 
there  ever,  then  or  at  any  other  time,  been  a 
man  who  could  find  such  language  for  his 
disapproval  as  Johnson  ?  "  Sir,  he  was  a 
scoundrel  and  a  coward  :  a  scoundrel,  for 
charging  a  blunderbuss  against  religion  and 
morality :  a  coward,  because  he  had  not 
resolution  to  fire  it  off  himself,  but  left  half- 
a-crown  to  a  beggarly  Scotchman  to  draw  the 
trigger  after  his  death."  It  is  at  once  as 
devastating  as  a  volcano  and  as  neat  as  a 
formal  garden.  So,  in  a  smaller  way,  is  his 
criticism  of  a  smaller  man.  Dr.  Adams, 
talking  of  Ne"\vton,  Bishop  of  Bristol,  whom 
Johnson  disliked,  once  said,  "  I  believe  his 
Dissertations    on   the   Prophecies  is  his  great 


JOHNSON'S   CHARACTER         167 

work,"  Johnson's  instant  answer  was,  "  Wliy, 
sir,  it  is  Tom's  great  work;  but  how  far  it  is 
great,  or  how  much  of  it  is  Tom's,  are  other 
questions."  How  mercilessly  perfect !  A 
thousand  years  of  preparation  could  not  have 
put  it  more  shortly  or  more  effectively.  It 
both  does  the  business  in  hand  and  gives 
expression  to  himself;  nor  is  there  in  it  a 
superfluous  syllable;  all  of  which  is,  again, 
another  way  of  saying  that  it  has  style.  And 
he  did  not  need  the  stimulus  of  personal 
feeling  to  give  him  this  energy  of  speech.  The 
same  gift  is  seen  when  he  "  communia  dicit,'* 
when  he  is  uttering  some  general  reflection, 
the  common  wisdom  of  mankind.  Moliere 
said,  "  Je  prends  mon  bien  oh.  je  le  trouve." 
Johnson  might  have  used  the  same  words 
with  a  slightly  different  meaning.  He  ex- 
celled all  men  in  recoining  the  gold  of  common 
sense  in  his  own  mind.  All  the  world  has 
said  "  humanum  est  errare  "  :  but  the  saying 
is  newborn  when  Johnson  clinches  an  argu- 
ment with,  "  No,  sir ;  a  fallible  being  will 
fail  somewhere."  So  on  a  hundred  other 
commonplaces  of  discussion  one  may  find 
him,  all  through  Boswell's  pages,  adding  that 
unanalysable  something  of  himself  in  word  or 
thought  which  makes  the  ancient  dry  bones 
stir  again  to  life.  "  It  is  better  to  live  rich  than 
to  die  rich  " ;    "no  man  is  a  hypocrite  in  his 


168    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

pleasures  " ;  "  it  is  the  business  of  a  wise  man 
to  be  happy  " ;  "he  that  runs  against  time 
has  an  antagonist  not  subject  to  casualties  " ; 
*'  the  great  excellence  of  a  writer  is  to  put 
into  his  book  as  much  as  his  book  will  hold  " ; 
*'  there  are  few  ways  in  which  a  man  can  be 
more  innocently  employed  than  in  getting 
money";  "no  woman  is  the  worse  for  sense 
and  knowledge  " ;  but  "  supposing  a  wife  to 
be  of  a  studious  or  argumentative  turn  it 
would  be  very  troublesome;  for  instance — 
if  a  woman  should  continually  dwell  upon  the 
subject  of  the  Arian  heresy  " ;  "a  man  should 
keep  his  friendship  always  in  repair  " ;  "to 
cultivate  kindness  is  a  valuable  part  of  the 
business  of  life  " ;  "  every  man  is  to  take 
existence  on  the  terms  on  which  it  is  given  to 
him  " ;  "  the  man  who  talks  to  luiburden  his 
mind  is  the  man  to  delight  you  *' ;  "  No,  sir, 
let  fanciful  men  do  as  they  will,  depend  upon 
it  it  is  difficult  to  disturb  the  system  of  life." 
!  The  man  who  thinks,  as  Taine  thought,  that 
sayings  of  this  sort  are  mere  commonplaces, 
will  never  understand  Johnson  :  he  may  give 
up  the  attempt  at  once.  The  true  common- 
place is  like  the  money  of  a  spendthrift  heir  : 
his  guineas  come  and  go  without  his  ever 
thinking  for  a  moment  where  they  came  from 
or  whither  they  go.  But  Johnson's  conunon- 
places  had  been  consciously  earned  and  were 


JOHNSON'S  CHARACTER         169 

deliberately  spent ;  he  had  made  them  himself, 
and  when  he  handed  them  on  to  others  he 
handed  himself  on  with  them.  Taine  may 
perhaps  be  excused ;  for  it  may  require  some 
knowledge  of  English  to  be  sure  of  detecting 
the  personal  flavour  Johnson  gave  to  his 
generalizations  :  but  the  Englishman  who 
misses  it  shows  that  he  has  mistaken  the 
ornaments  of  literature  for  its  essence  and 
exposes  himself  to  the  same  criticism  as  a  man 
who  cannot  recognize  a  genius  unless  he  is 
eccentric.  Johnson  could  break  out  in  con- 
versation as  well  as  in  his  books  into  a  noble 
eloquence  all  his  own;  such  a  phrase  as 
*'  poisoning  the  sources  of  eternal  truth," 
rises  spontaneously  to  his  lips  when  his 
indignation  is  aroused.  His  free  language 
disdained  to  be  confined  within  any  park 
palings  of  pedantry.  Some  of  his  most 
characteristic  utterances  owe  their  flavour 
to  combining  the  language  of  the  schools  with 
the  language  of  the  tavern  :  as  when  he  said 
of  that  strange  inmate  of  his  house,  Mss 
Carmichael,  "  Poll  is  a  stupid  slut.  I  had 
some  hopes  of  her  at  first  :  but  when  I  talked 
to  her  tightly  and  closely  I  could  make 
nothing  of  her;  she  was  wiggle  waggle,  and  I 
could  never  persuade  her  to  be  categorical." 
He  was  the  very  antipodes  of  a  retailer 
of  other  men's  thoughts  in  other  men's  words  : 


170    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

every  chapter  of  Boswell  brings  its  evidence 
of  Johnsonian  eloquence,  of  Johnsonian 
quaintness,  raciness,  and  abundance,  of  the 
surprising  flights  of  his  fancy,  of  the  in- 
exhaustible ingenuity  of  his  arguments  and 
illustrations.  No  talk  the  world  has  ever 
heard  is  less  like  the  talk  of  a  commonplace 
man.  Yet  the  supreme  quality  of  it  is  not 
the  ingenuity  or  the  oddness  or  the  wit  :  it 
is  the  thing  Taine  missed,  the  sovereign  sanity 
of  the  Johnsonian  common  sense.  Bagehot 
once  said  that  it  was  the  business  of  the 
English  Prime  Minister  to  have  more  common 
sense  than  any  man.  Johnson  is  the  Prime 
Minister  of  literature;  or  perhaps,  rather,  of 
life.  Not  indeed  for  a  time  of  revolution. 
For  that  we  should  have  to  go  to  some  one 
less  unwilling  to  "  disturb  the  system  of  life.'* 
But  for  ordinary  times,  and  in  the  vast 
majority  of  matters  all  times  are  ordinary, 
Johnson  is  the  man.  The  Prime  Minister  is 
not  the  whole  of  the  body  politic,  of  course  : 
and  there  are  purposes  for  which  we  need  people 
with  more  turn  than  Johnson  for  starting  and 
pressing  new  ideas  :  but  these  will  come  best 
from  below  the  gangway;  and  they  will  be 
none  the  worse  in  the  end  for  having  had  to 
undergo  the  formidable  criticism  of  a  Prime 
Minister  whose  first  article  of  faith  is  that  the 
King's  government  must  be  carried  on.     The 


JOHNSON'S   WORKS  171 

slow-moving  centrality  of  Johnson's  mmd,  not 
to  be  diverted  by  any  far-looking  whimsies 
from  the  daily  problem  of  how  life  was  to  be 
lived,  is  not  the  least  important  of  the  qualities 
that  have  given  him  his  unique  position  in  the 
respect  and  affection  of  the  English  race. 


CHAPTER  V 

Johnson's  works 

In  his  lifetime  Johnson  was  chiefly  thought 
of  as  a  great  writer.  To-day  we  think  of  him 
chiefly  as  a  great  man.  That  is  the  measure 
of  Boswell's  genius  :  no  other  biographer  of 
a  great  writer  has  unconsciously  and  unin- 
tentionally throAvn  his  hero's  own  works  into 
the  shade.  Scott  will  always  have  a  hundred 
times  as  many  readers  as  Lockhart,  and 
Macaulay  as  Trevelyan.  But  in  this,  as  in 
some  other  ways,  Boswell's  involuntary  great- 
ness has  upset  the  balance  of  truth.  John- 
son's writings  are  now  much  less  read  than 
they  deserve  to  be.  For  this  there  are  a 
variety  of  causes.  Fourteen  years  before  he 
died,  William  Wordsworth  was  born  at 
Cockermouth ;  and  fourteen  years  after  his 
death  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  published 
the  volume  which,  more  perhaps  than  any 


172    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

other,  started  English  Hterature  on  its  great 
voyage  into  seas  unsailed  and  unimagined 
by  Johnson.  The  triumph  of  the  Romantic 
movement  inevitably  brought  with  it  the 
depreciation  of  the  prophet  of  common  sense 
in  literature  and  in  life.  The  great  forces  in  the 
literature  of  the  next  seventy  or  eighty  years 
were :  in  poetry,  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  Scott, 
Byron,  Shelley,  Keats;  in  prose,  Scott,  and 
then  later  on,  Carlyle  and  Ruskin;  every 
single  one  of  them  providing  a  wine  by  no 
means  to  be  put  into  Johnsonian  bottles. 

Johnson,  even  more  than  other  men  in  the 
eighteenth  century,  was  abstract  and  general 
in  his  habit  of  mind  and  expression.  The  men 
of  the  new  age  were  just  the  opposite ;  they 
were  concrete  and  particular,  lovers  of  detail 
and  circumstance.  The  note  of  his  writings 
had  been  common  sense  and  rugged  veracity ; 
the  dominant  notes  of  theirs  were  picturesque- 
ness,  eloquence,  emotion,  even  sentimentalisra. 
Both  the  exaggerated  hopes  and  the  exag- 
gerated fears  aroused  by  the  French  Revolu- 
tion disinclined  their  victims  to  listen  to  the 
middling  sanity  of  Johnson.  The  hopes  built 
themselves  fancy  castles  of  equality  and 
fraternity  which  instinctively  shrunk  from 
the  broadsides  of  Johnsonian  ridicule.  The 
fears  hid  themselves  in  caves  of  mediaeval 
reaction  and  did  not  care  to  expose  their  eyes 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  173 

to  the  smarting  daylight  of  Johnsonian 
common  sense.  His  appeal  had  always  been 
to  argument  :  the  new  appeal  was  at  worst  to 
sentiment,  at  best  to  history  for  which  Johnson 
was  too  true  to  his  century  to  care  anything. 
When  Voltaire  writes  an  article  on  monasti- 
cism,  he  has  nothing  to  say  about  how  it  arose 
and  developed;  he  neither  knows  nor  cares 
anything  about  that.  For  him  it  is,  like  every- 
thing else,  a  thing  to  be  judged  in  a  court  of 
abstract  rationality,  altogether  independent 
of  time  and  circumstance,  and  as  such  he  has 
no  difficulty  in  dismissing  it  with  brilliant  and 
witty  contempt  without  telling  us  anything 
about  what  it  actually  is  or  was.  It  was  this 
unhistorical  spirit  which,  as  Burke  rightly 
preached,  was  the  most  fatal  element  in  the 
French  Revolution.  But  the  French  are  not 
to  be  blamed  alone  for  an  intellectual  atmo- 
sphere which  was  then  universal  in  Europe. 
Little  as  Johnson  would  have  liked  the  associa- 
tion, it  must  be  admitted  that  he  was  in  his 
way  as  pure  and  unhistorical  a  rationalist  as 
Voltaire  and  the  Encyclopgedists ;  and  that 
it  was  inevitable  that  the  reaction  in  favour 
of  history  which  Burke  set  in  motion  would 
tell  against  him  as  well  as  against  them. 
Against  the  discovery  that  things  can  neither 
be  rightly  judged  nor  wisely  reformed  except 
by  examining  how  they  came  to  be  what  they 


174    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

are,  the  whole  eighteenth  century,  and  in  it 
Johnson  as  well  as  Rousseau  and  Voltaire, 
stands  naked.  And  the  abstract  rationalizing 
of  that  century  was  soon  to  have  another 
enemy  in  alliance  with  history,  the  new  force 
of  science.  Nothing  has  been  more  fatal  to 
the  arbitrary  despotism  of  mere  reason  than 
the  idea  of  development,  of  evolution.  Directly 
it  is  seen  that  all  life  exliibits  itself  in  stages 
it  becomes  obvious  that  the  dry  light  of  reason 
will  not  provide  the  materials  for  true  judg- 
ment until  it  has  been  coloured  by  a  sym- 
pathetic insight  into  the  conditions  of  the 
particular  stage  under  discussion. 

All  these  things,  then,  were  against  Johnson. 
Alike  to  the  new  Liberalism  ever  more  and 
more  drenched  in  sentiment,  to  the  new 
Conservatism  ever  more  and  more  looking 
for  a  base  in  history,  to  Romanticism  in 
literature  with  its  stir,  colour  and  emotion, 
to  science  with  its  new  studies  and  new 
methods,  the  works  of  Johnson  almost  in- 
evitably appeared  as  the  dry  bones  of  a  dead 
age.  He  had  laughed  at  the  Romans  :  and 
behold  the  Romans  had  played  a  great  part 
in  the  greatest  of  Revolutions.  He  had 
laughed  at  "  noble  prospects  "  and  behold 
the  world  was  gone  after  them,  and  his, 
"  Who  can  like  the  Highlands  ?  "  was  drowned 
in  the  poetry  of  Scott  and  Byron,  and  made 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  175 

to  appear  narrow  and  vulgar  in  the  presence 
of  Wordsworth.  Only  in  one  field  did  any- 
great  change  take  place  likely  to  be  favourable 
to  Johnson's  influence.  The  religious  and 
ecclesiastical  revival  which  was  so  conspicuous 
in  England  during  the  first  half  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  was  naturally  inclined  to 
exalt  Johnson  as  the  only  strong  Churchman, 
and  almost  the  only  definite  Christian  among 
the  great  writers  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
The  fact,  too,  that  the  most  conspicuous  centre 
of  the  revival  was  Oxford,  where  Johnson's 
name  had  always  been  affectionately  remem- 
bered, helped  to  send  its  votaries  back  to  him. 
But  this  alliance  could  not  be  more  than 
partial.  The  Oxford  Movement  soon  de- 
generated into  Mediaevalism  and  Ritualism, 
and  no  m-an  was  less  fitted  than  Johnson  to  be 
the  prophet  of  either.  The  genius  of  common 
sense  was  the  very  last  leader  their  devotees 
could  wish  for.  And  as  the  revival  became 
increasingly  a  reaction,  relying  more  and  more 
on  supposed  precedent  and  less  on  the  essential 
reason  of  things,  it  inevitably  got  further  away 
from  Johnson  who  cared  everything  for  reason 
and  nothing  at  all  for  dubious  history. 

But  it  was  not  merely  the  changes  that  came 
over  the  general  mind  of  the  nation  that  went 
against  Johnson  ;  it  was  still  more  the  revo- 
lution in  his  own  special  branch  of  literature. 


176    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

He  was  the  last  great  English  critic  who 
treated  poets,  not  as  great  men  to  be  under- 
stood, but  as  school-boys  to  be  corrected. 
He  still  applied,  as  the  French  have  always 
done,  a  preordained  standard  to  the  work  he 
was  discussing,  and  declared  it  correct  or  not 
according  to  that  test.  The  new  criticism 
inaugurated  by  Coleridge  aimed  at  interpreta- 
tion rather  than  at  magisterial  regulation; 
and  no  one  will  now  revert  to  the  old.  We 
never  now  find  an  English  critic  writing  such 
notes,  common  till  lately  in  France,  as  "  cela 
n*est  pas  frangais,"  "  cela  ne  se  dit  pas," 
*'  11  faut  ecrire  " — such  and  such  a  phrase, 
and  not  the  phrase  used  by  the  poet  receiving 
chastisement.  But  Johnson  does  conclude 
his  plays  of  Shakespeare  with  such  remarks 
as:  "The  conduct  of  this  play  is  deficient." 
"  The  passions  are  directed  to  their  true  end." 
"  In  this  play  are  some  passages  which 
ought  not  to  have  been  exliibited,  as  we 
are  told  they  were,  to  a  maiden  Queen." 
The  substance  of  these  comments  may  often 
be  just,  but  for  us  their  tone  is  altogether 
wrong.  We  no  longer  think  that  a  critic, 
even  if  he  be  Johnson,  should  distribute 
praise  or  blame  to  poets,  even  of  much 
less  importance  than  Shakespeare,  with  the 
confident  assurance  of  a  school-master  looking 
over  a   boy's   exercise.     Johnson's   manner. 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  177 

then,  as  a  critic  was  against  him  witTi  the 
nineteenth  century.  But  so  also  was  his 
matter.  The  poetry  he  really  believed  in  was 
that  of  what  the  nineteenth  century  came  to 
regard  as  the  age  of  prose.  Of  his  three  great 
Lives  we  feel  that  those  of  Dryden  and  Pope 
express  the  pleasure  he  spontaneously  and 
unconsciously  felt,  while  that  of  Milton  is  a 
reluctant  tribute  extorted  from  him  by  a 
genius  he  could  not  resist.  Among  the  few 
poets  in  his  long  list  for  whom  the  nineteenth 
century  cared  much  are  Gray  and  Collins  : 
and  of  Collins  he  says  almost  nothing  in  the 
way  of  admiration,  and  of  Gray  very  little. 
Even  when  he  wrote  of  Shakespeare,  to  whom 
he  paid  a  tribute  that  will  long  outlive  those 
of  blind  idolatry,  what  he  praised  is  not  what 
seemed  greatest  to  the  lovers  of  poetry  in  the 
next  generation.  A  critic  who  found  "  no 
nice  discriminations  of  character  in  Macbeth,'* 
and  defended  Tate's  "  happy  family  "  ending 
of  Lear,  was  not  unnaturally  dismissed  or 
ignored  by  those  who  had  sat  at  the  feet  of 
Coleridge  or  Lamb. 

There  is  still  one  other  thing  which  told 
against  him.  No  one  influenced  the  course 
of  English  literature  in  the  nineteenth  century 
so  much  as  Wordsworth.  And  Wordsworth 
was  a  determined  reformer  not  only  of  the 
matter  of  poetry  but  of  its  very  language. 

M 


178    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

He  overstated  his  demands  and  did  not  get 
his  ideas  clear  to  his  own  mind,  as  may  be 
seen  by  the  fact  that  he  instinctively  recoiled 
from  applying  the  whole  of  them  in  his  own 
poetical  practice.  But  he  plainly  advocated 
two  things  as  essential  parts  of  his  reform; 
poetry  was  to  go  back  for  its  subject  to  the 
primary  universal  facts  of  human  life,  and  it 
was  to  use  as  far  as  possible  the  language 
actually  used  by  plain  men  in  speaking  to 
each  other.  Both  these  demands  had  to 
submit  to  modification ;  but  both  profoundly 
influenced  the  subsequent  development  of 
English  poetry  :  and  both  were,  as  Words- 
worth knew,  opposed  to  the  teaching  and 
practice  of  Johnson.  The  return  to  simplicity 
involved  a  preference  for  such  poetry  as 
Percy's  Ballads  which  Johnson  had  ridiculed, 
and  a  distaste  for  the  poetry  of  the  town 
which  Johnson  admired.  And  both  in  the 
famous  Preface  and  in  the  Appendix  and 
Essay  Supplementary  added  to  it  Wordsworth 
refers  to  Johnson  and  seems  to  recognize  him 
as  the  most  dangerous  authority  with  whom 
he  has  to  contend.  In  that  contest  Words- 
worth was  on  the  whole  decidedly  victorious ; 
and  to  that  extent  again  Johnson  was  dis- 
credited. Nor  was  it  the  language  of  poetry 
only  which  was  affected.  Under  the  influences 
wliich    Wordsworth,    Scott    and  _  Byron    set 


JOHNSON'S   WORKS  179 

moving,  the  old  colourless,  abstract,  professedly 
classical  language  was  supplanted  even  in 
prose.  The  new  prose  was  enriched  by  a 
hundred  qualities  of  music,  colour  and  sugges- 
tion, at  which  the  prose  of  the  eighteenth 
century  had  never  aimed.  Those  who  had 
enjoyed  the  easy  grace  of  Lamb,  the  swift 
lightnings  of  Carlyle,  the  eloquence,  playful- 
ness and  tenderness  of  Ruskin,  the  lucid 
suavity  of  Newman,  were  sure  to  conclude 
in  their  haste  that  the  prose  of  Johnson  was 
a  thing  pompous,  empty  and  dull. 

But  against  all  these  indictments  a  reaction 
has  now  begun.  Like  other  reactions  its  first 
utterances  are  apt  to  be  extravagant.  Li 
literature  as  in  politics  those  who  at  last  take 
their  courage  in  their  hands  and  defy  the 
established  opinion  are  obliged  to  shout  to 
keep  their  spirits  up.  So  Sir  Walter  Raleigh, 
whose  Six  Essays  at  once  put  the  position  of 
Johnson  on  a  new  footing,  has  allowed  himself 
to  say  of  some  sentences  from  The  Rambler 
that  they  are  "  prose  which  will  not  suffer 
much  by  comparison  with  the  best  in  the 
language."  But,  apart  from  these  inevitable 
over-statements  of  defiance,  what  he  has  said 
about  Johnson  is  unanswered  and  unanswer- 
able. And  at  last  it  is  able  to  fall  upon  a 
soil  prepared  for  it.  In  all  directions  the 
Gothic  movement,  which  was  so  inevitably 

M  2 


180    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

unfavourable  to  the  fame  of  Johnson,  has 
crumbled  and  collapsed.  A  counter  move- 
ment seems  to  be  in  progress.  The  classical 
revival  in  architecture  is  extending  into  other 
fields  and  though  no  one  wishes  to  undo  the 
poetic  achievement  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
every  one  has  come  to  wish  to  understand  that 
of  the  eighteenth.  We  shall  never  again 
think  that  Dryden  and  Pope  had  the  essence 
of  poetry  in  them  to  the  same  extent,  as, 
for  instance,  Wordsworth  or  Shelley;  but 
neither  shall  we  ever  again  treat  them  with 
the  superficial  and  ignorant  contempt  which 
was  not  uncommon  twenty  or  thirty  years  ago. 
The  twentieth  century  is  not  so  confident  as 
its  predecessor  that  the  poetry  and  criticism 
of  the  eighteenth  may  safely  be  ignored. 

If,  then,  we  are  not  to  ignore  Johnson's 
writing,  what  are  we  to  remember  ?  In  a 
sketch  like  this  the  point  of  view  to  be  taken 
is  that  of  the  man  with  a  general  interest  in 
English  letters,  not  that  of  the  specialist  in 
the  eighteenth  century,  or  indeed,  that  of  any 
specialist  at  all.  Well,  then,  first  of  all  Johnson 
wrote  verses  which  though  not  great  poetry 
have  some  fine  qualities.  They  are,  like  so 
much  of  the  verse  of  that  century,  chiefly 
"  good  sense  put  into  good  metre."  That 
is  what  Twining,  the  Aristotelian  critic,  said 
of  them  when  Johnson  died.     He  had  a  much 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  181 

finer  sense  of  poetry  than  Johnson,  and  he  was 
perfectly  right  m  this  criticism.  But  it  is 
a  loss  and  not  a  gain  that,  since  Wordsworth 
gave  us  such  a  high  conception  of  what  poetry 
should  be,  we  have  ceased  to  take  pleasure 
in  good  verses  simply  for  their  own  sake.  In 
the  eighteenth  century  a  new  volume  of  verse 
became  at  once  the  talk  of  the  town  and  every 
cultivated  person  read  it.  Now  we  have 
allowed  poetry  to  become  a  thing  so  esoteric 
in  its  exaltation  that  only  the  poetically 
minded  can  read  it.  Neither  the  Excursion 
nor  the  Epipsychidion  could  possibly  be  read 
by  the  great  public.  All  the  world  could  and 
did  read  Pope's  Epistles  and  Goldsmith's 
Traveller.  It  may  have  been  worth  while  to 
pay  the  price  for  the  new  greatness  of  poetry 
that  came  in  with  the  nineteenth  century; 
but  it  is  at  any  rate  right  to  remember  that 
there  was  a  price,  and  that  it  has  had  to  be 
paid.  It  may  be  that  some  day  we  shall  be 
able  again  to  take  pleasure  in  well-turned 
verses  without  losing  our  appreciation  of 
higher  things.  Good  verse  is,  really,  a 
delightful  thing  even  when  it  is  not  great 
poetry,  and  we  are  too  apt  now-a-days  to 
forget  that  verse  has  one  great  inherent 
advantage  over  prose,  that  it  impresses  itself 
on  the  memory  as  no  prose  can.  We  can  all 
quote  scores  of  lines  from  Pope,  though  we 


182     DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

may  not  know  who  it  is  whom  we  are  quoting. 
That  is  the  pleasure  of  art.  And  if  the  Hnes, 
as  often,  utter  the  voice  of  good  sense  in 
morals  or  politics,  it  is  its  accidental  utility 
also.  Johnson  has,  of  course,  little  of  Pope's 
amazing  dexterity,  wit  and  finish.  But  he  has 
some  qualities  of  which  Pope  had  nothing  or  not 
very  much.  In  his  verse,  as  everywhere  else, 
he  shows  a  sense  of  the  real  issues  of  things 
quite  out  of  the  reach  of  a  well-to-do  wit  living 
in  his  library,  like  Pope ;  what  he  writes  may 
be  in  form  an  imitation  of  Juvenal,  but  it  is  in 
essence  a  picture  of  life  and  often  of  his  own  life. 
How  large  a  part  of  the  business  of  poetry 
consists  in  giving  new  expression  to  the  old 
truths  of  experience,  is  known  to  all  the  great 
poets  and  seen  in  their  practice.  Johnson  can 
do  this  with  a  force  that  refuses  to  be  forgotten. 

"  But  few  there  are  whom  hours  like  these  await. 
Who  set  unclouded  in  the  gulfs  of  fate. 
From  Lydia's  monarch  should  the  search 

descend, 
By  Solon  cautioned  to  regard  his  end. 
In  life's  last  scene  what  prodigies  surprise. 
Fears  of  the  brave  and  follies  of  the  wise  ! 
From  Marlborough's   eyes  the  streams   of 

dotage  flow. 
And  Swift  expires  a  driveller  and  a  show." 

Such  lines  almost  challenge  Pope  on  his  own 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  183 

ground,  meeting  his  rapier-like  dexterity  of 
neatness  with  heavy  sword-strokes  of  sincerity 
and  strength.  But  here,  as  in  the  prose,  the 
true  Johnsonian  excellence  is  best  seen  when 
he  is  in  the  confessional. 

"  Should  no  disease  thy  torpid  veins  invade, 
Nor    Melancholy's    phantoms     haunt    thy 

shade ; 
Yet  hope  not  life  from  grief  or  danger  free. 
Nor  think  the  doom  of  man  reversed  for  thee — ■ 
Deign  on  the  passing  world  to  turn  thine  eyes. 
And  pause  awhile  from  Letters  to  be  wise ; 
There  mark  what  ills  the  scholar's  life  assail. 
Toil,  envy,  want,  the  patron,  and  the  gaol." 

There,  and  in  such  lines  as  the  stanza  on 
Levett — 

**  His  virtues  walked  their  narrow  round. 
Nor  made  a  pause,  nor  left  a  void ; 
And  sure  the  Eternal  Master  found 
The  single  talent  well  employed," 

one  hears  the  authentic  unique  voice  of  John- 
son;   not  that  of  a  great  poet  but  of  a  real 
man  to  whom  it  is  always  worth  while  to 
listen,  and  not  least  when  he  puts  his  thoughts 
into  the  pointed  shape  of  verse. 
^      Still,  of  course,  prose  and  not  verse  is  his 
\  natural  medium.     And  here  a  word  should 
/  be  said  about  that  prose  style  of  his  which 
\Jhad  an  immense  vogue  for  a  time  and  plainly 


184    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

influenced  most  of  the  ^  writers  of  his  own  and 
the  following  generation,  even  men  so  great 
as  Gibbon  and  the  young  Ruskin,  and  women 
so  brilliant  as  Fanny  Burney.  Then  a  re- 
action canae  and  it  was  generally  denounced 
as  pompous,  empty  and  verbose.  After  the 
Revolution  people  gave  up  wearing  wigs,  and 
with  the  passing  of  wigs  and  buckle -shoes 
there  came  a  dislike  of  the  dignified  deport- 
ment of  the  eighteenth  century  in  weightier 
matters  than  costume.  Now  Johnson,  what- 
ever he  did  at  other  times,  was  commonly  in- 
clined to  put  on  his  wig  before  he  took  up  his 
pen.  His  elaborate  and  antithetical  phrases 
are  apt  to  go  into  pairs  like  people  in  a  Court 
procession,  and  seem  at  first  sight  to  belong 
altogether  to  what  we  should  call  an  artificial 
as  well  as  a  ceremonious  age.  His  style  is  the 
exact  opposite  of  Dryden's,  of  which  he  said 
that,  having  "  no  prominent  or  discriminative 
characters,"  it  "  could  not  easily  be  imitated 
either  seriously  or  ludicrously."  Johnson's 
could  ,be,  and  often  was,  imitated  in  both 
spirits.  Even  in  his  lifetime,  when  it  was 
most  admired,it  was  already  parodied.  Gk)ld- 
smith  was  talking  once  of  the  art  of  writing 
fables,  and  of  the  necessity,  if  your  fable  be 
about  "  little  fishes,"  of  making  them  talk 
like  "  little  fishes  " ;  Johnson  laughed  :  upon 
;which  Goldsmith  said,  "  Why,  Dr.  Johnson, 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  185 

this  is  not  so  easy  as  you  seem  to  think  :  for 
if  you  were  to  make  Httle  fishes  talk,  they  would 
talk  like  whales."  That  was  the  weak  spot 
in  Johnson  on  which  the  wits  and  critics 
seized  at  once  :  there  is  a  good  deal  of  mis- 
placed magniloquence  in  his  wi'itings.  When 
the  sage  in  Rasselas  says,  "  I  have  missed  the 
endearing  elegance  of  female  friendship,  and 
the  happy  commerce  of  domestic  tenderness,'* 
we  now  feel  at  once  that  the  simple  and  natural 
thought  gains  nothing  and  loses  much  by  this 
heavy  pomp  of  abstract  eloquence.  So  when 
Johnson  wants  to  say  in  the' eleventh  Idler  that 
it  is  wrong  and  absurd  to  let  our  spirits  depend 
on  the  weather,  he  makes  his  reader  laugh 
or  yawn,  rather  than  listen,  by  the  ill-timed 
elaboration  of  his  phrases  :  "to  call  upon  the 
sun  for  peace  and  gaiety,  or  deprecate  the 
clouds  lest  sorrow  should  overwhelm  us,  is  the 
cowardice  of  idleness,  and  the  idolatry  of  folly.'* 
So  much  must  be  admitted.  Johnson  is  often 
turgid  and  pompous,  often  grandiose  with  an 
artificial  and  undesired  grandiloquence.  No 
one,  however,  who  has  read  his  prose  works 
will  pretend  that  this  is  a  fair  account  of  his 
ordinary  style.  You  may  read  many  Rarri' 
biers  in  succession  and  scarcely  find  a  marked 
instance  of  it;  and,  as  every  one  knows,  his 
last,  longest  and  pleasantest  work,  the  Lives  of 
the  Poets,  is  almost  free  from  it.     All  through 


186    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS  CIRCLE 

his  life  one  can  trace  a  kind  of  progress  as  he 
gradually  shakes  off  these  mannerisms,  and 
Writes  as  easily  as  he  talked.  They  are  most 
conspicuous  in  The  Rambler  and  Rasselas.  But 
even  there,  through  all  the  heaviness,  born 
perhaps  of  the  too  obvious  desire  to  instruct 
and  improve,  we  get  more  than  occasional 
suggestions  of  the  trenchant  force  which  we 
most  associate  with  the  pages  of  Bos  well. 

"  My  curiosity,"  said  Rasselas,  "  does  not 
very  strongly  lead  me  to  survey  piles  of  stone, 
or  mounds  of  earth;  my  business  is  with 
man.  I  came  hither  not  to  measure  fragments 
of  temples,  or  trace  choaked  aqueducts,  but  to 
look  upon  the  various  scenes  of  the  present 
world.  ...  To  judge  rightly  of  the  present 
we  must  oppose  it  to  the  past ;  for  all  judgment 
is  comparative,  and  of  the  future  nothing  can 
be  known." 

There  is  nothing  here  of  the  intimacy  and 
charm  which,  as  Dryden  and  Cowley  had 
already  shown,  and  Johnson  himself  was 
occasionally  to  show  in  his  last  years,  a  plain 
prose  may  possess ;  but  of  the  lucidity  and 
force  which  are  its  most  necessary  charac- 
teristics never  prose  exhibited  more.  Those 
who  know  their  Boswell  will  catch  in  the 
passage  a  pleasant  foretaste  of  the  outburst 
to  Tlu'ale  when  he  wanted  Johnson  to  contrast 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  187 

French  and  English  scenery  :  "  Never  heed 
such  nonsense,  sir ;  a  blade  of  grass  is  always 
a  blade  of  grass,  whether  in  one  country  or 
another;  let  us,  if  we  do  talk,  talk  about 
something;  men  and  women  are  my  subjects 
of  inquiry  :  let  us  see  how  these  differ  from 
those  we  have  left  behind." 

This  natural  trenchancy  gets  freer  play,  of 
course,  in  the  talk  than  in  the  writings.  But 
it  is  in  them  all  from  the  first,  even  in  Rasselas, 
even  in  The  Rambler.  "  The  same  actions 
performed  by  different  hands  produce  different 
effects,  and,  instead  of  rating  the  man  by  his 
performances  we  rate  too  frequently  the  per- 
formances by  the  man.  .  .  .  Benefits  which 
are  received  as  gifts  from  wealth  are  exacted 
as  debts  from  indigence;  and  he  that  in  a 
high  station  is  celebrated  for  superfluous 
goodness  would  in  a  meaner  condition  have 
barely  been  confessed  to  have  done  his  duty." 

It  is  not  necessary  to  multiply  citations. 
What  is  found  even  in  The  Rambler,  which  he 
himself  in  later  years  found  "too  wordy,"  is 
found  much  more  abundantly  in  the  Dictionary 
and  the  Shakespeare  ;  and  as  he  grows  old, 
and,  with  age  and  authority,  increasingly 
indifferent  to  criticism  and  increasingly  con- 
fident in  his  own  judgment,  there  gradually 
comes  an  ease  and  familiarity  which  without 


188    DR.   JOHNSON  AND    HIS  CIRCLE 

diminishing  the  perfect  lucidity  of  the  phrases 
adds  sometimes  to  the  old  contemptuous  force, 
and  occasionally  brings  a  new  intimacy  and 
indulgence.  The  writing  becomes  gradually 
more  hke  the  talk.  Nobody  in  his  earlier  work 
was  ever  quite  so  unceremoniously  kicked 
downstairs  as  Wilkes  was  in  The  False  Alarm. 

"  All  wrong  ought  to  be  rectified.  If 
IVIr.  Wilkes  is  deprived  of  a  lawful  seat,  both 
he  and  his  electors  have  reason  to  complain, 
but  it  will  not  be  easily  found  why,  among  the 
innumerable  wrongs  of  which  a  great  part  of 
mankind  are  hourly  complaining,  the  whole 
care  of  the  publick  should  be  transferred  to 
Mr.  Wilkes  and  the  freeholders  of  Middlesex, 
who  might  all  sink  into  non-existence  without 
any  other  effect  than  that  there  would  be 
room  made  for  a  new  rabble  and  a  new 
retailer  of  sedition  and  obscenity." 

This  is  the  old  power  of  invective  indulged 
now  with  the  reckless  indifference  of  a  man 
who  is  talking  among  friends,  knows  his 
power  and  enjoys  using  it.  But  the  ease  of 
his  later  manner  more  commonly  takes  the 
form  of  a  redoubled  directness  in  his  old 
appeal  to  universal  experience,  or  that  of 
those  natural  indulgences  of  old  age,  anecdote 
and  autobiography.  Take,  for  instance,  the 
first  volume  of  his  Lives.     It  is  not  only  full 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  189 

of  such  admirable  generalizations  as  that  in 
which  he  sums  up  the  case  for  a  literary  as 
against  a  mathematical  or  scientific  educa- 
tion :  "  The  truth  is  that  the  knowledge  of 
external  nature  and  the  sciences  which  that 
knowledge  requires  or  includes  are  not  the 
great  or  the  frequent  business  of  the  human 
mind.  .  .  .  We  are  perpetually  moralists  : 
we  are  geometricians  only  by  chance  " ;  or 
that  in  which  he  expresses  his  contempt  for 
Dryden  exchanging  Billingsgate  with  Settle  : 
"  Minds  are  not  levelled  in  their  powers,  but 
when  they  are  first  levelled  in  their  desires  " ; 
or  the  pregnant  commonplace  with  which 
he  prefaces  his  derision  of  the  artificial  love- 
poems  which  Cowley  thought  it  necessary  to 
address  to  an  imaginary  mistress  :  "It  is 
surely  not  difficult,  in  the  solitude  of  a  college 
or  in  the  bustle  of  the  world,  to  find  useful 
studies  and  serious  emplojTTient."  This  is 
the  Johnson  his  readers  had  known  from  the 
beginning.  "V^Tiat  is  newer  are  the  personal 
touches  sprinkled  all  over  the  book.  Here 
he  will  bring  in  a  fact  about  his  friend,  Sir 
Joshua  Reynolds;  there  he  will  give  a  piece 
of  information  derived  from  "  my  father,  an 
old  bookseller."  He  who  studied  life  and 
manners  before  all  things  loves  to  record 
the  personal  habits  of  his  poets  and  to  try 
their  writings  rather  by  the  tests  of  life  than 


190    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

of  criticism.  He  was,  perhaps,  the  first  great 
critic  to  take  the  seeming  trifles  of  daily  hfe 
out  of  the  hands  of  gossips  and  anecdote- 
mongers,  and  give  them  their  due  pl-ace  in 
the  study  of  a  great  man.  All  this  necessarily 
gave  him  something  of  the  colloquial  ease 
of  the  writer  of  recollections.  Nothing  could 
be  simpler  than  his  style  when  he  tells  us 
of  Milton  that  "  when  he  first  rose  he  heard 
a  chapter  in  the  Hebrew  Bible  and  then  studied 
till  twelve;  then  took  some  exercise  for  an 
hour ;  then  dined ;  then  played  on  the  organ, 
and  sang,  or  heard  another  sing ;  then  studied 
to  six ;  then  entertained  his  visitors  till  eight ; 
then  supped,  and  after  a  pipe  of  tobacco  and 
a  glass  of  water  went  to  bed."  On  which 
his  comment  is  characteristic  and  plainly 
autobiographical.  "So  is  his  life  described; 
but  this  even  tenour  appears  attainable  only 
in  colleges.  He  that  lives  in  the  world  will 
sometimes  have  the  succession  of  his  practice 
broken  and  confused.  Visitors,  of  whom 
Milton  is  represented  to  have  had  great 
numbers,  will  come  and  stay  unseasonably  : 
business,  of  which  every  man  has  some,  must 
be  done  when  others  will  do  it."  This  may 
still  have  about  it  something  of  the  style  of 
a  school-master,  but  of  a  school-master  who 
teaches  the  art  of  living,  not  without  having 
learnt  by  experience  the  di  fficulty  of  practising  it . 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  191 

So  we  may  trace  the  gradual  diminution, 
but  never  the  entire  disappearance,  of  the  exces- 
sive "  deportment  "  which  is  the  best  knoA\Ti 
feature  of  Johnson's  style.  Of  another  feature 
often  found  in  it  by  hostile  critics  less  need 
be  said  because  it  is  not  really  there  at  all. 
Johnson  is  frequently  accused  of  verbosity. 
If  that  word  means  merely  pomposity  it  has 
already  been  discussed.  If  it  means,  as  it 
should  mean,  the  use  of  superfluous  words 
adding  nothing  to  the  sense,  few  authors  are 
so  seldom  guilty  of  it  as  Johnson.  There 
are  many  good  writers,  Scott,  for  instance, 
and  the  authors  of  the  Book  of  Common 
Prayer,  in  whom  a  hurried  reader  might 
frequently  omit  half  a  phrase  without  de- 
priving his  hearers  of  an  ounce  of  meaning. 
But  you  cannot  do  that  with  Johnson. 
Words  that  add  neither  information  nor 
argument  to  what  has  gone  before  are  ex- 
ceptionally rare  in  him.  Take  his  style  at 
its  worst.  "It  is  therefore  to  me  a  severe 
aggravation  of  a  calamity,  when  it  is  such 
as  in  the  common  opinion  will  not  justify 
the  acerbity  of  exclamation,  or  support  the 
solemnity  of  vocal  grief."  Heavier  writing 
there  could  scarcely  be.  But  every  word  has 
its  duty  to  do.  The  supposed  speaker  has 
been  saying  that  he  is,  like  Sancho  Panza, 
quite  unable  to  suffer  in  silence ;  and  he  adds 


192    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

that  this  makes  many  a  misfortune  harder 
for  him  to  bear  than  it  need  be  :  for  it  may- 
arise  from  an  injury  which  other  people  think 
too  trifling  to  justify  any  open  expression 
of  anger,  or  from  an  accident  that  may  seem 
to  them  so  petty  that  they  will  not  endure 
any  serious  lamentation  about  it.  Johnson's 
way  of  saying  this  is  pompous  and  rather 
absurd ;  but  it  is  not  verbose.  So  when  he  says 
that  he  knows  nothing  of  Mallet  except  "  what 
is  supplied  by  the  unauthorized  loquacity  of , 
common  fame,"  it  is  possible  to  dislike  the 
phrase;  it  is  not  possible  to  deny  that  the 
words  are  as  full  of  meaning  as  words  can  be. 
The  fact  is  that  Johnson's  style  has  the 
merits  and  defects  of  scholarship.  He  knows, 
as  a  scholar  will,  how  every  word  came  upon 
the  paper,  consequently  he  seldom  uses 
language  which  is  either  empty  or  inexact; 
but  with  the  scholar's  accuracy  he  has  also 
the  scholar's  pride.  The  dignity  of  literature 
was  constantly  in  his  mind  as  he  wrote;  and 
he  did  not  always  write  the  better  for  it. 
Books  in  his  day  and  in  his  eyes  were  still 
rather  solemn  things  to  be  kept  above  the 
linguistic  level  of  conversation.  Dryden  and 
Addison  had  already  begun  to  make  the 
great  discovery  that  the  best  prose  style 
has  no  conscious  air  of  literature  about  it; 
but  the  new  doctrine  had  not  reached  the 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  193 

mass  either  of  writers  or  readers.  And  it 
never  completely  reached  Johnson.  He  him- 
self once  accidentally  gave  one  of  the  best 
definitions  of  the  new  style  when  he  said  of 
Shakespeare's  comic  dialogue  that  it  was 
gathered  from  that  kind  of  conversation  which 
is  "above  grossness  and  below  refinement." 
And  at  the  end  of  his  life  he  even  occasionally 
produced  some  good  specimens  of  it.  But, 
taking  his  work  as  a  whole,  it  must  be  admitted 
that  he  could  rarely  bring  himself  to  be 
"  below  refinement,"  the  refinement  not  of 
the  drawing-room  but  of  the  library.  In 
what  he  says  he  is  always  a  man ;  in  the  way 
he  says  it  he  is  nearly  always  too  visibly  an 
author.  Those  who  have  eyes  to  see  and  the 
will  to  look  never  fail  of  finding  the  man; 
but  the  author  stares  them  in  the  face. 

His  prose  works  may  be  divided  into  two 
classes,  those  in  which  he  is  primarily  a 
moralist,  and  those  in  which  he  is  primarily 
a  critic.  Life  and  manners  are  never  out  of 
his  mind;  but  while  they  are  the  direct  and 
avowed  subject  of  The  Rambler,  The  Idler  and 
Rasselas,  they  only  come,  as  it  were,  in- 
directly into  the  Dictionary,  the  Shakespeare 
and  the  Lives  of  the  Poets,  where  the  ostensible 
business  is  the  criticism  of  literature.  Outside 
these  categories  are  the  political  pamphlets, 
the  interesting  Journey  to  the  Western  Islands^ 


N 


194    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

and  a  great  quantity  of  miscellaneous  literary 
hack-work.  All  of  these  have  mind  and 
character  in  them,  or  they  would  not  be 
Johnson's ;  but  they  call  for  no  special  dis- 
cussion. Nor  do  the  Prayers  and  Meditations^ 
which  of  course  he  did  not  publish  himself. 
It  is  enough  to  say  that,  while  fools  have 
frequently  ridiculed  them,  all  who  have  ever 
realized  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  the 
warfare  of  the  spirit  with  its  own  weakness, 
will  find  a  poignant  interest  in  the  tragedy  of 
Johnson's  inner  life,  always  returning  again 
and  again  to  the  battle  in  which  he  seemed 
to  himself  to  be  always  defeated. 

The  Rambler,  The  Idler  and  Rasselas  fill 
four  volumes  out  of  the  twelve  in  the  1823 
library  edition  of  Johnson.  When  Johnson 
decided  to  bring  out  a  periodical  paper  he,  of 
course,  had  the  model  of  the  Spectator  and 
Tatler  before  him.  But  he  had  in  him  less  of 
the  graces  of  life  than  Addison  and  Steele,  and 
a  far  deeper  sense  of  the  gravity  of  its  issues ; 
with  the"  result  that  The  Rambler  and  The 
Idler  are  much  heavier  than  their  predecessors, 
not  only  in  style  but  in  substance.  They 
deal  much  more  avowedly  with  instruction. 
As  we  read  them  we  wonder,  not  at  the  slow 
sale  of  the  original  papers,  but  at  the  editions 
which  the  author  lived  to  see.  We  stand 
amazed  to-day  at  the  audacity  of  a  journalist 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  195 

who  dares  to  offer,  and  at  the  patience  or 
wisdom  of  a  public  which  is  content  twice  a 
week  to  read,  not  exciting  events  or  enter- 
taining personahties,  but  sober  essays  on 
the  most  ancient  and  apparently  threadbare 
of  topics.  Here  are  Johnson's  subjects  for  the 
ten  Ramblers  which  appeared  between  Novem- 
ber 20  and  December  22,  1750  :  the  shortness 
of  life,  the  value  of  good -humour,  the  folly 
of  heirs  who  live  on  their  expectations, 
peevishness,  the  impossibility  of  knowing 
mankind  till  one  has  experienced  misfortune, 
the  self-deceptions  of  conscience,  the  moral 
responsibilities  of  men  of  genius,  the  power 
of  novelty,  the  justice  of  suspecting  the 
suspicious,  the  pleasures  of  change  and  in 
particular  that  of  winter  following  upon 
summer.  None  of  these  can  be  called  ex- 
citing topics.  Yet  when  there  is  a  man  of 
real  power  to  discuss  them,  and  men  of  sense 
to  listen  to  him,  they  can  make  up  a  book 
which  goes  through  many  editions,  is  trans- 
lated into  foreign  languages,  and  is  called  by 
a  great  critic  a  hundred  and  fifty  years  after 
its  appearance,  a  "  splendid  repository  of 
wisdom  and  truth."  With  the  exception 
of  the  first  word.  Sir  Walter  Raleigh's  daring 
praise  may  be  accepted  as  strictly  true. 
There  is  nothing  splendid  about  The  Rambler 
or    The   Idler.     The    more    shining    qualities 

N  2 


196    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

of  literature,  except  occasional  eloquence,  are 
conspicuously  wanting  in  them.  There  is 
no  imagination,  little  of  the  fancy,  wit  and 
readiness  of  illustration  so  omnipresent  in 
Johnson's  talk,  little  power  of  drawing  char- 
acter, very  little  humour.  He  often  puts  his 
essay  into  the  form  of  a  story,  but  it  remains 
an  essay  still.  His  strength  is  always  in 
the  reflections,  never  in  the  facts  related  or 
the  persons  described.  The  club  of  Essex 
gentlemen  who  fancied  themselves  to  be 
satirized  in  The  Rambler  were  only  an  ex- 
treme instance  of  the  common  vanity  which 
loves  to  fancy  itself  the  subject  of  other 
people's  thoughts.  Johnson's  portraits  have 
jiot  life  enough  to  be  caricatures;  still  less 
can  posteritv  find  in  them  the  finer  ti-uth  of 
]iuman  beings.  His  was  a  profounder  mind 
than  Addison's ;  but  he  could  not  have  drawn 
Sir  Roger  de  Coverley.  He  had  not  "  run 
about  the  world,"  as  he  said,  for  nothing,  and 
he  knew  a  great  deal  about  men  and  women ; 
but  he  could  not  create^  Rasselas,  his  only 
professed  story,  is  a  total  failure  as  a  story. 
It  is  a  series  of  moral  essays,  and  whoever 
reads  it  must  read  it  for  the  same  reasons 
as  he  reads  The  Rambler.  The  remark 
Johnson  absurdly  made  of  Richardson's 
masterpiece  is  exactly  true  of  his  own 
Rasselas  :  "  If  you  were  to  read  it  for  the  story 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  197 

your  impatience  would  be  so  fretted  that  you 
would  hang  yourself." 

In  all  these  things,  as  elsewhere,  his  strength 
lies  in  shrewdness,  in  a  common  sense  that 
has  been  through  the  fiie  of  experience,  in 
a  real  love  of  wisdom  and  truth.  There  is 
a  story  that  Charlotte  Bronte,  when  a  girl 
of  sixteen,  broke  out  very  angrily  at  some  one 
who  said  she  was  always  talking  about  clever 
men  such  as  Johnson  and  Sheridan.  "  Now 
you  don't  know  the  meaning  of  clever,"  she 
said ;  "  Sheridan  might  be  clever — scamps 
often  are,  but  Johnson  hadn't  a  spark  of 
*  cleverality '  in  him."  That  remark  gives 
the  essence  of  The  Rambler.  Whoever  wants 
"  cleverality,"  whoever  wants  what  Mr.  Shaw 
and  Mr.  Chesterton  supply  so  brilliantly  and 
abundantly  to  the  present  generation,  had 
best  leave  Johnson  alone.  The  signal  merit 
of  his  writings  is  the  exact  opposite  of 
"  cleverality  " ;  it  is  that  he  always  means 
exactly  what  he  says.  He  often  talked  for 
victory,  but  except,  perhaps,  in  the  political 
pamphlets  he  always  wrote  for  truth. 

Books  like  The  Rambler  and  Rasselas  do 
not  easily  lend  themselves  to  illustration; 
the  effect  they  produce  is  a  cumulative 
effect.  Slowly,  as  we  read  paper  after  paper, 
the  mind  and  character  of  Johnson  take  hold 
of  us;  what,  we  began  with  impatience  or 


198    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

perhaps  with  contempt,  we  put  down  with 
respect  and  admiration.  At  the  end  we  feel 
that  we  would  gladly  put  our  lives  into  the 
hands  of  this  rough,  wise,  human,  limited, 
lovable  man.  To  get  to  that  impression  the 
books  must  be  read;  but  one  or  two  illus- 
trations may  be  given.  There  is  nothing 
new  to  say  about  death,  but  the  human 
heart  will  itself  be  dead  when  it  is  willing 
to  give  up  saying  again  the  old  things  that 
have  been  said  on  that  subject  from  the 
beginning  of  the  world.  Who  puts  more  of 
it  into  saying  them  than  Johnson  ? 

"  When  a  friend  is  carried  to  his  grave,  we 
at  once  find  excuses  for  every  weakness, 
and  palliations  of  every  fault;  we  recollect 
a  thousand  endearments  which  before  glided 
off  our  minds  without  impression,  a  thousand 
favours  unrepaid,  a  thousand  duties  unper- 
formed, and  wish,  vainly  wish,  for  his  return, 
not  so  much  that  we  may  receive,  asjthat  we 
may  bestow  happiness,  and  recompense  that 
kindness  which  before  we  never  understood." 

Where  in  this  is  the  pompous  pedant  who 
is  so  commonly  supposed  to  be  the  writer 
of  Johnson's  books  ?  The  English  language 
has  not  often  been  more  beautifully  handled. 
It  is  true  that,  until  one  looks  closely,  the 
last  words  of  the  first  sentence  appear  to  be 
a  piece  of  empty  verbiage;  but  taken  as  a 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  199 

whole  the  passage  moves  with  a  grave  music 
fitted  to  its  sober  tmth.  The  art  in  it  is  as 
admirable  as  the  emotion  is  sincere. 

Or  take  a  different  illustration  from  a 
Rambler,  in  which  he  is  discussing  the  well- 
known  fact  that  the  commonest  cause  of 
shyness  is  self-importance. 

"  Those  who  are  oppressed  by  their  own 
reputation  will  perhaps  not  be  comforted  by 
hearing  that  their  cai-es  are  unnecessary. 
But  the  truth  is  that  no  man  is  much  regarded 
by  the  rest  of  the  world.  He  that  considers 
how  little  he  dwells  upon  the  condition  of 
others  will  learn  how  little  the  attention  of 
others  is  attracted  by  himself.  While  we 
see  multitudes  passing  before  us  of  whom, 
perhaps,  not  one  appears  to  deserve  our 
notice  or  excite  our  sympathy,  we  should 
remember  that  we,  likewise,  are  lost  in  the 
same  throng;  that  the  eye  which  happens 
to  glance  upon  us  is  turned  in  a  moment  on 
him  that  follows  us,  and  that  the  utmost 
which  we  can  reasonably  hope  or  fear  is  to 
fill  a  vacant  hour  with  prattle,  and  be 
forgotten.". 

All  good  writers  write  of  themselves;  not, 
as  vain  people  talk,  of  their  triumphs  and 
grievances  and  diseases,  but  of  what  they 
have  succeeded  in  grasping  as  their  own  out 
of  all  the  floating  wisdom  of  the  world.     In 


200    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

a  passage  like  this  one  almost  hears  Johnson 
reflecting  aloud  as  he  walks  back  in  his  old 
age  to  his  lonely  rooms  after  an  evening  at 
"  The  Club  "  or  the  Mitre.  It  is  the  graver 
side  of  what  he  once  said  humorously  to 
Boswell  :  "  I  may  leave  this  town  and  go  to 
Grand  Cairo  without  being  missed  here  or 
observed  there."  But  the  autobiographical 
note  is  sometimes  even  plainer.  Of  whom 
could  he  be  thinking  so  much  as  of  himself 
when  he  wi'ote  the  101st  Rambler  ? 

"  Perhaps  no  kind  of  superiority  is  more 
flattering  or  alluring  than  that  which  is 
conferred  by  the  powers  of  conversation, 
by  extemporaneous  sprightliness  of  fancy, 
copiousness  of  language,  and  fertility  of 
sentiment.  In  other  exertions  of  genius, 
the  greater  part  of  the  praise  is  unknown 
and  unenjoyed;  the  writer,  indeed,  spreads 
his  reputation  to  a  wider  extent,  but  receives 
little  pleasure  or  advantage  from  the  diffusion 
of  his  name,  and  only  obtains  a  kind  of  nominal 
sovereignty  over  regions  which  pay  no  tribute. 
The  colloquial  wit  has  always  his  o^\^l  radiance 
reflected  on  himself,  and  enjoys  all  the 
pleasure  which  he  bestows ;  he  finds  his  power 
confessed  by  every  one  that  approaches  him, 
sees  friendship  kindling  with  rapture  and 
attention  swelling  into  praise." 

In  that  shrewd  observation  lies  the  secret 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  201 

of  the  comparative  unproductiveness  of  his 
later  years.  Men  hke  Dryden,  and  Gibbon 
and  Lecky  are  the  men  to  get  througF*im- 
mense  hterary  lal)6il?3  :  to  a  great  talker  like 
Johnson  what  can  the  praises  of  reviewers 
or  of  posterity  be  in  comparison  with  the 
flashing  eyes,  and  attentive  ears,  the  expectant 
silence  and  spontaneous  applause,  of  the 
friends  in  whom  he  has  an  immediate  mirror 
jof  his  success  ? 

It  is  impossible  and  unnecessary  to  multiply 
illustrations.  The  only  thing  that  need  be 
added  is  that  even  in  JRasselas  and  the  essays, 
JohnsQn,'s_slpw-moying  style  is  constantly 
relieved  by  those  brief  and  pregnant  generaliz- 
ations of  whicji  he  is  one  of  the  greatest 
masters  in  our  language.  They  are  so  close 
to  life  as  all  men  know  it,  that  the  careless 
reader,  as  we  have  already  seen,  is  apt  to 
take  them  for  platitudes;  but  there  is  all 
the  difference  between  the  stale  superficiality 
which  coldly  repeats  what  only  its  ears  have 
heard,  and  these  sayings  of  Johnson  heated 
to  new  energy  in  the  fii-es  of  conscience, 
thought  and  experience.  "  I  have  already 
enjoyed  too  much,"  says  the  Prince  in 
Rasselas ;  "  give  me  something  to  desire." 
And  then,  a  little  later,  as  so  often  happens 
with  the  wise,  comes  the  other  side  of  the 
medal  of  truth  :  "  Human  life  is  everywhere 


202    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

a  state  in  which  much  is  to  be  endured  and 
little  to  be  enjoyed."  Or  take  such  sentences 
as  that  embodying  the  favourite  Johnsonian 
and  Socratic  distinction  :  "to  man  is  per- 
mitted the  contemplation  of  the  skies,  but 
the  practice  of  virtue  is  commanded  " ;  or, 
"  we  will  not  endeavour  to  fix  the  destiny 
of  kingdoms  :  it  is  our  business  to  consider 
what  beings  like  us  may  perform  " ;  or  such 
sayings  as,  "  the  truth  is  that  no  mind  is 
much  employed  upon  the  present :  recollection 
and  anticipation  fill  up  almost  all  our 
moments  " ;  "  marriage  has  many  pains  but 
celibacy  has  no  pleasures  " ;  "  envy  is  almost 
the  only  vice  which  is  practicable  at  all 
times  and  in  every  place  " ;  "no  place  affords 
a  more  striking  conviction  of  the  vanity  of 
human  hopes  than  a  public  library " ;  "I 
have  always  thought  it  the  duty  of  an 
anonymous  author  to  write  as  if  he  expected 
to  be  hereafter  known  " ;  or,  last  of  all,  to 
bring  citation  to  an  end,  that  characteristic 
saying  about  the  omnipresence  of  the  tempta- 
tions of  idleness  :  "  to  do  nothing  is  in  every 
man's  power  :  we  can  never  want  an  oppor- 
tunity of  omitting  duties." 

Johnson's  principal  work  as  a  scholar  and 
critic  of  literature  is  to  be  found  in  his 
Dictionary,  the  edition  of  Shakespeare,  and 
the  Lives  of  tlw  Poets.     It  has  the  strength 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  203 

and  weakness  which  might  be  anticipated  by 
any  intelHgent  person  who  had  read  Boswell 
and  the  Ramblers.  It  abounds  in  manhness, 
courage,  and  modesty  :  it  never  for  an  instant 
forgets  that  hterature  exists  for  the  sake  of 
hfe  and  not  hfe  for  the  sake  of  hterature  :  it 
has  no  esoteric  or  professional  affectations, 
but  says  plain  things  in  plain  words  such  as 
all  can  understand.  The  literary  critic  can 
have  no  more  valuable  qualities  than  these. 
But  they  do  not  complete  his  equipment. 
The  criticism  of  Johnson  has  many  limitations. 
He  was  entirely  without  aesthetic  capacity. 
Not  only  were  music  and  the  plastic  arts 
nothing  to  him — as  indeed  they  have  been  to 
many  good  judges  of  poetry — but  he  does  not 
appear  to  have  possessed  any  musical  ear  or 
much  power  of  imagination.  It  is  not  going 
too  far  to  say  that  of  the  highest  possibilities 
of  poetry  he  had  no  conception.  He  imagines 
he  has  disposed  of  Lycidas  by  exhibiting  its 
"  inherent  improbability  "  in  the  eyes  of  a 
crude  common  sense  :  a  triumph  which  is  as 
easy  and  as  futile  as  his  refutation  of 
Berkeley's  metaphysics  by  striking  his  foot 
upon  the  ground.  The  truth  is  of  course 
that  in  each  case  he  is  beating  the  air.  The 
stamp  upon  the  ground  would  have  been  a 
triumphant  answer  to  a  fool  who  should  say 
that  the  senses  cannot  feel :  it  does  not  touch 


204    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

Berkeley  who  says  they  cannot  know.  So 
the  attack  on  Lycidas  might  be  fatal  to  a 
judge  who  put  his  judgment  into  the  form  of 
a  pastoral ;  as  the  criticism  of  a  poet  it  is  in 
the  main  simply  irrelevant.  It  is  evident 
that  what  Johnson  admires  in  Milton  is  the 
power  of  his  mind  and  the  elevation  of  his 
character,  not  at  all  his  purely  poetic  gifts. 
He  never  betrays  the  slightest  suspicion  that 
in  speaking  of  Milton  he  is  speaking  of  one  of 
the  very  greatest  artists  the  world  has  ever 
known.  He  thought  blank  verse  was  verse 
only  to  the  eye,  and  found  the  "  numbers  " 
of  Lycidas  "  unpleasing."  He  did  not  believe 
that  anybody  read  Paradise  Lost  for  pleasure, 
and  said  so  with  his  usual  honesty.  He  saw 
nothing  in  Samson  Agonistes  but  the  weakness 
of  the  plot;  of  the  heights  and  depths  of  its 
poetry  he  perceived  nothing.  He  preferred 
the  comedies  to  the  tragedies  of  Shakespeare  : 
felt  the  poet  in  him  much  less  than  the  omni- 
scient observer  of  universal  life  :  and  indeed, 
if  we  may  judge  by  what  he  says  in  the  preface 
to  the  Dictionary,  hardly  thought  of  him  as  a 
master  of  poetic  language  at  all.  He  had 
evidently  no  appreciation  of  the  Greek  drama- 
tists. The  thing  that  moves  him  in  poetry 
is  eloquence  of  expression  and  energy  of 
thought  :  both  good  things  but  things  that 
can    exist    outside    poetry.  ;  The    arguments 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  205 

in  which  he  states  his  objections  to  devotional 
poetry  in  the  Hfe  of  Waller  show  that  he 
regarded  poetry  as  an  artful  intellectual 
embroidery,  not  as  the  only  fit  utterance  of 
an  exalted  mood. 

To  such  a  conception  we  can  never  return 
after  all  that  has  been  done  for  us  by  Words- 
worth and  Coleridge  and  Matthew  Arnold,  to 
say  nothing  of  some  living  critics  like  Mr. 
Yeats.  No  one  who  cares  at  all  for  poetry 
now  could  think  of  regretting  an  unwritten 
epic  in  the  language  Johnson  uses  about 
Dryden's  :  "  it  would  doubtless  have  im- 
proved our  numbers  and  enlarged  our 
language;  and  might  perhaps  have  con- 
tributed by  pleasing  instruction  to  rectify 
our  opinions  and  purify  our  manners."  It 
is  not  that  such  criticism  is  false  but  that 
it  is  beside  the  mark.  An  epic  poem  may 
do  all  these  things,  as  a  statesman  may  play 
golf  or  act  as  churchwarden  :  but  when  he 
dies  it  is  not  his  golf  or  his  churchwardenship 
that  we  feel  the  loss  of.  Put  this  remark  of 
Johnson's  by  the  side  of  such  sayings  as  have 
now  become  the  commonplaces  of  criticism. 
We  need  not  go  out  to  look  for  them.  They 
are  everywhere,  in  the  mouths  of  all  who 
speak  of  poetry.  One  opens  Keats'  letters  at 
random  and  finds  him  saying,  "  Poetry  should 
be  great  and  unobtrusive,  a  thing  that  enters 


206    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

into  one's  soul."  One  takes  up  the  work  of  a 
living  critic,  Mr.  Eccles,  and  one  finds  him  say- 
ing, in  his  book  on  French  poetry,  that  when 
we  go  to  the  very  root  of  poetry  one  of  the 
things  we  discern  is  the  "  mystical  collabora- 
tion of  a  consecrated  element  of  form  in  the 
travail  of  the  spirit."  Language  of  this  sort 
is  now  almost  the  ordinary  language  of 
criticism.  Blake  and  Wordsworth  did  not 
conquer  the  kingdom  of  criticism  in  a  moment 
or  a  year  :  but  when  at  last  they  did  its  whole 
tone  and  attitude  necessarily  changed.  Where 
Johnson,  even  while  praising  IMilton's  "  skill 
in  harmony  "  as  "  not  less  than  his  learning," 
discusses  it  merely  as  "  skill,"  as  a  sort  of 
artisanship,  and  misses  all  its  subtler  and 
rarer  mysteries,  we  see  in  it  an  inspiration 
as  much  an  art,  life  itself  raised  as  it  were 
to  a  higher  denomination,  a  power  of  spirit — 

*'  Dead  things  with  inbreathed  sense  able  to 
pierce." 

It  is  the  measure  of  the  distance  we  have 
travelled  away  from  Johnson  that  even  plain 
people  to-day,  if  they  care  for  poetry  at  all, 
find  much  more  in  it  than  a  piece  of  cunning 
craftsmanship.  It  is  always  that  no  doubt  : 
but  for /US  to-day  it  is  also  something  far 
higher :  a  symbol  of  eternity.  And  more 
than  a  symbol,  a  sacrament :   for  it  not  only 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  207 

suggests  but  reveals  :  it  is  the  truth  which 
it  signifies ;  itself  a  part,  as  all  those  who 
have  ever  profoundly  felt  its  influence  are 
assured,  of  the  eternal  order  of  things  to 
which  it  points. 

Plainly,  then,  some  of  the  things  which 
now  seem  to  us  to  be  of  the  very  innermost 
essence  of  poetry  are  not  things  which  can 
be  weighed  in  any  scales  known  to  Johnson. 
Yet  in  spite  of  his  limitations  he  is  certainly 
one  of  the  masters  of  English  criticism.  The 
great  critic  may  be  said  to  be  one  who  leaves 
the  subject-matter  of  his  criticism  more 
respected  and  better  understood  than  he  found 
it.  Johnson's  principal  subjects  were  the 
English  language,  the  plays  of  Shakespeare, 
and  the  poets  from  Cowley  to  his  own  day. 
There  can  be  no  question  of  the  services  he 
rendered  to  the  English  language.  His 
Dictionary,  as  was  inevitable,  had  many 
faults,  especially  of  etymology :  but  its 
publication  marks  an  epoch  in  the  history  of 
English.  It  was  a  kind  of  challenge  to  the 
world.  Other  nations  had  till  then  inclined 
to  look  upon  our  language  and  literature  as 
barbarous  :  and  we  had  not  been  very  sure 
ourselves  that  we  had  any  right  to  a  place  on 
the  Parnassus  of  the  nations.  Great  men 
in    Italy    and    France    had    thought    those 


208    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

languages  worth  the  labours  of  a  lifetime. 
In  England  before  Johnson's  Dictionary, 
nothing  had  been  done  to  claim  for  English 
an  equal  place  with  Italian  or  French  in  the 
future  of  the  literature  and  civilization  of  the 
world.  What  companies  of  learned  men  had 
taken  generations  to  do  for  foreign  countries 
had  now  been  done  for  England  in  a  few  years 
by  the  industry,  and  abilities  of  a  single 
scholar.  Englishmen  who  took  a  pride  in 
their  language  might  now  do  so  with  under- 
standing ;  foreigners  who  wished  to  learn 
English  could  now  learn  in  the  method  and 
spirit  of  a  scholar,  no  longer  merely  as  travel- 
lers or  tradesmen.  The  two  folio  volumes  of 
the  Dictionary  were  the  visible  evidence  that 
English  had  taken  its  place  in  the  literary 
polity  of  Europe.  They  were  the  fit  pre- 
cursors of  the  triumphant  progress  soon  to  be 
made  by  Burke  and  Scott  and  Byron.  The 
other  great  service  which  Johnson  rendered  to 
our  language  by  his  Dictionary  and  its  Preface 
could  only  have  been  rendered  by  a  man  so 
superior  to  the  narrowness  of  scholarship  as 
Johnson.  No  doubt  as  a  single  individual 
in  a  private  position  he  was  not  exposed  to 
such  temptations  to  law-giving  arrogance  as 
the  French  Academicians.  But  nevertheless 
it  is  to  his  credit  that  he  frankly  recognized 
that  a  language  is  a  living  thing,  and  that 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  209 

life  means  growth  and  growth  change.  So 
far  as  it  lay  in  the  power  of  the  French  critics 
the  new  dignity  that  came  to  their  language 
in  the  seventeenth  century  was  made  to 
involve  a  pedantic  and  sterile  immobility. 
The  meaning,  the  spelling,  the  arrangement, 
of  words  was  to  be  regulated  by  immutable 
law,  and  all  who  disobeyed  were  to  be 
punished  as  lawless  and  insolent  rebels. 
Johnson  knew  better.  Both  his  melancholy 
and  his  common  sense  taught  him  that  "  lan- 
guage is  the  work  of  man,  of  a  being  from 
whom  permanence  and  stability  cannot  be 
derived."  He  knew  that  words  coming  from 
human  mouths  must  follow  the  law  of  life  : 
"  when  they  are  not  gaining  strength  they  are 
losing  it."  His  business  was  not  the  vain 
folly  of  trying  to  bind  the  future  in  fetters  : 
it  was  to  record  the  present  use  and  past 
history  of  words  as  accurately  as  he  could 
ascertain  them,  and,  by  showing  Englishmen 
what  their  heritage  was  and  whence  they  had 
received  it,  to  make  them  proud  of  its  past 
and  jealous  of  its  future.  The  pedant  wishes 
to  apply  a  code  of  Median  rigidity  to  correct 
the  barbarous  freedom  of  a  language  to  which 
scholarship  has  never  applied  itself.  Johnson 
gave  our  savages  laws  and  made  them  citizens 
of  a  constitutional  state :  but,  however 
venerable  the  laws  and  however  little  to  be 


210    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

changed  without  grave  reason,  he  knew  that, 
if  the  Hterary  pohty  of  England  lived  and 
grew,  new  needs  would  arise,  old  customs 
become  obsolete,  and  the  laws  of  language, 
like  all  others,  would  have  to  be  changed  to 
meet  the  new  conditions.  But  the  urgent 
business  at  that  moment  was  to  codify  the 
floating  and  uncertain  rules  which  a  student 
of  English  found  it  difficult  to  collect  and 
impossible  to  reconcile.  Johnson  might  often 
be  wrong  :  but  after  him  there  was  at  least 
an  authority  to  appeal  to  :  and  that,  as  he 
himself  felt,  was  a  great  step  forward  :  for  it 
is  of  more  importance  that  the  law  should  be 
known  than  that  it  should  be  right. 

To  have  done  all  this,  and  to  have  explained 
what  was  done  and  what  was  attempted  in 
language  of  such  manliness,  modesty  and 
eloquence  as  that  of  the  great  Preface,  is  to 
have  rendered  one  of  the  greatest  services 
that  can  be  rendered  to  the  literature  of  a 
nation.  "  The  chief  glory  of  every  people," 
says  Johnson,  "  arises  from  its  authors." 
That  would  be  a  bold  thing  to  say  to-day  and 
was  a  bolder  then,  especially  in  so  prosaic  a 
place  as  the  preface  to  a  dictionary.  But 
the  world  sees  its  truth  more  and  more.  And 
it  is  less  out  of  place  in  a  dictionary  than 
appears  at  first  sight.  For  that  glory  is  not 
easily  gained  or  recognized  till  both  authors 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  211 

and  people  realize  that  their  language  is  the 
peer  of  the  greatest  in  the  world,  a  fit  vehicle 
for  the  highest  thoughts  that  can  enter  the 
mind  of  man.  And  towards  that  result  in 
England  only  a  few  works  of  genius  have 
contributed  more  than  Johnson's  Dictionary. 
After  the  language  itself  comes  the  most 
priceless  of  its  monuments.  The  services 
Johnson  rendered  to  Shakespeare  are  only 
second  to  those  he  rendered  to  the  language 
in  which  Shakespeare  wrote.  The  Preface 
to  his  edition  of  Shakespeare  is  certainly  the 
most  masterly  piece  of  his  literary  criticism  : 
and  it  may  still  be  doubted,  after  all  that  has 
been  written  about  Shakespeare  in  the  century 
and  a  half  that  separate  it  from  our  own  day, 
whether  the  world  can  yet  show  any  sixty 
pages  about  Shakespeare  exhibiting  so  much 
truth  and  wisdom  as  these.  All  Johnson's 
gifts  are  seen  at  their  best  in  it  :  the  lucidity, 
the  virile  energy,  the  individuality  of  his 
style  :  the  unique  power  of  first  placing  himself 
on  the  level  of  the  plain  man  and  then  lifting 
the  plain  man  to  his  :  the  resolute  insistence 
on  life  and  reason,  not  learning  or  ingenuity, 
as  the  standard  by  which  books  are  to  be 
judged.  No  one  ever  was  so  free  as  Johnson 
from  that  pest  of  literature  which  a  fine 
French  critic,  one  of  the  subtlest  of  his 
countrymen,    called    "  I'ingenieux    sans    bon 

O  2 


212    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

sens  " ;  and  he  never  showed  himself  so  free 
of  it  as  in  his  Shakespeare.  The  master  of 
hfe  who  "  whether  hfe  or  nature  be  his  subject, 
shows  plainly  that  he  has  seen  with  his  own 
eyes,"  inspired  the  great  critic  with  more 
even  than  his  usual  measure  of  sanity  :  and 
perhaps  the  very  best  things  in  the  Preface 
and  the  notes  are  the  frequent  summonings 
of  ingenious  sophistries  to' the  bar  of  a  merci- 
less common  sense.  Let  those  who,  with  a 
good  living  writer,  fancy  his  criticism  merely 
a  lifeless  application  of  mechanical  rules,  read 
again  the  famous  passage  in  the  preface  where 
he  dismisses  the  claim  of  the  unities  of  place 
and  time  to  be  necessary  to  the  proper  illusion 
of  drama.  Never  did  critic  show  himself  freer 
of  the  easy  slavery  to  traditional  rules  which 
afflicts  or  consoles  sluggish  minds.  In  John- 
son's pages  at  any  rate,  there  is  "  always  an 
appeal  open,"  as  he  says,  "  from  criticism  to 
nature."  And,  though  all  his  prejudices, 
except  those  of  the  Anti-Gallican,  must  have 
carried  him  to  the  side  of  the  unities,  he  goes 
straight  to  the  truth  of  experience,  obtains 
there  a  decisive  answer,  and  records  it  in  a  few 
pages  of  masterly  reasoning.  The  first  breath 
of  the  facts,  as  known  to  every  one  who  has 
visited  a  theatre,  is  brought  to  demolish  the 
airy  castles  of  pedantry  :  and  it  is  shown  that 
unity  is  required  not  for  the  sake  of  deceiving 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  213 

the  spectators,  which  is  impossible,  but  for 
the  sake  of  bringing  order  into  chaos,  art  into 
nature,  and  the  immensity  of  hfe  within  hmits 
that  can  be  compassed  by  the  powers  of  the 
human  mind.  The  unity  of  action,  which 
assists  the  mind,  is  therefore  vital  :  the 
unities  of  time  and  place,  which  are  apparently 
meant  to  deceive  it,  are  empty  impostures. 
For  "  the  truth  is  that  the  spectators  are 
always  in  their  senses,  and  know,  from  the 
first  act  to  the  last,  that  the  stage  is  only  a 
stage  and  the  players  only  players " :  *'  the 
delight  proceeds  from  our  consciousness  of 
fiction  :  if  we  thought  murders  and  treasons 
real  they  would  please  no  more." 

But  this  is  simply  one  specially  famous 
passage  in  an  essay  which  is  full  of  matter 
from  the  first  page  to  the  last.  It  says  little, 
of  course,  of  the  sublime  poetry  of  Shake- 
speare, and  it  cannot  anticipate  that  criticism 
of  the  imagination  which  Goethe  and  Cole- 
ridge have  taught  us  to  expect  from  every 
writer  about  Shakespeare.  The  day  for  that 
was  not  yet :  and  as  Johnson,  himself  among 
the  first  to  suggest  the  "historical  and  com- 
parative point  of  view  in  criticism,  says  in 
this  very  preface,  "  every  man's  performances, 
to  be  rightly  estimated,  must  be  compared 
with  the  state  of  the  age  in  which  he  lived 
and  with  his  own  particular  opportunities." 


214    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

He  had  a  different  task,  and  he  performed 
it  so  admirably  that  what  he  says  can  never 
be  out  of  date.  It  had  not  then  become 
superfluous  to  insist  on  the  greatness  of 
Shakespeare  :  if  it  has  since  become  so  no 
small  share  of  that  result  may  be  ascribed 
to  Johnson.  We  forget  that,  because,  as  he 
said  of  Dryden,  it  is  the  fate  of  a  critic  who 
convinces  to  be  lost  in  the  prevalence  of  his 
own  discovery.  Never  certainly  has  the 
central  praise  of  Shakespeare,  as  the  master 
of  truth  and  universality,  been  better  set 
forth  than  by  Johnson.  Our  ears  are  de- 
lighted, our  powers  of  admiration  quickened,' 
our  reasons  convinced,  as  we  read  the  suc- 
cession of  luminous  and  eloquent  paragraphs 
in  which  he  tries  Shakespeare  by  the  tests 
of  time,  of  nature,  of  universality,  and  finds 
him  supreme  in  all.  Nor  did  Johnson  ever 
wi'ite  anything  richer  in  characteristic  and 
memorable  sentences,  fit  to  be  quoted  and 
thought  over  by  themselves.  "  Nothing  can 
please  many  and  please  long  but  just  represen- 
tations of  general  nature."  "  Shakespeare 
always  makes  nature  predominant  over 
accident.  .  .  .  His  story  requires  Romans  but 
he  thinks  only  on  men  " ;  "  there  is  a  kind  of 
intellectual  remoteness  necessary  for  the 
comprehension  of  any  great  work  " ;  "  nature 
{i.  e.  genius,  what  a  man  inherits  at  birth) 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  215 

gives  no  man  knowledge  " ;  "  upon  the  whole 
all  pleasure  consists  in  variety";  "love  has 
no  great  influence  upon  the  sum  of  life."  It 
is  startling  to  find  Johnson  anticipating  Mr. 
Bernard  Shaw,  and  more  startling  still  to  be 
told  in  a  study  of  the  author  of  Romeo  and 
Juliet  that  love  "  has  little  operation  in  the 
drama  of  a  poet  who  caught  his  ideas  from 
the  living  world."  But  when  we  put  our- 
selves in  Johnson's  position  and  compare 
Shakespeare  with  the  reigning  dramatists  of 
France  and  England,  we  shall  see  that  it  is 
in  fact  not  the  least  striking  thing  about 
Shakespeare  that  he  has  so  many  plays  in 
which  the  love  interest  scarcely  appears. 

The  service  Johnson  rendered  to  the  study 
of  Shakespeare  is,  however,  by  no  means 
confined  to  these  general  considerations.  No 
man  did  more,  perhaps,  to  call  criticism  back 
from  paths  that  led  to  nowhere,  or  to  suggest 
directions  in  which  discoveries  might  be  made. 
The  most  marked  contrast  between  him  and 
earlier  critics  is  his  caution  about  altering  the 
received  text.  He  first  stemmed  the  tide  of 
rash  emendation,  and  the  ebb  which  began 
with  him  has  continued  ever  since."  The  case 
for  moderation  in  this  respect  has  never  been 
better  stated  than  in  his  words :  "It  has 
been  my  settled  principle  that  the  reading  of 


216    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE 

the  ancient  books  is  probably  true,  and  there- 
fore is  not  to  be  disturbed  for  the  sake  of 
elegance,  perspicuity  or  mere  improvement  of 
the  sense.  For  though  much  credit  is  not  due 
to  the  fidelity,  nor  any  to  the  judgment  of 
the  first  publishers,  yet  they  who  had  the  copy 
before  their  eyes  were  more  likely  to  read  it 
right  than  we  who  read  it  only  by  imagina- 
tion." And  in  several  other  matters  he  in 
passing  dropped  a  seed  which  has  ripened  in 
other  minds  to  the  great  increase  of  our 
knowledge.  "  Shakespeare,"  he  says,  "  has 
more  allusions  than  other  poets  to  the  tra- 
ditions and  superstition  of  the  vulgar,  which 
must  therefore  be  traced  before  he  can  be 
understood."  Few  critical  seeds  have  had  a 
larger  growth  than  this  :  and  the  same  may 
be  said  of  the  pregnant  hint  about  the  frequent 
necessity  of  looking  for  Shakespeare's  meaning 
**  among  the  sports  of  the  field."  He  neither 
overestimated  the  importance  nor  under- 
estimated the  difficulties  of  the  critic  of 
Shakespeare.  With  his  usual  sense  of  the 
true  scale  of  things  he  treats  the  quarrels  of 
commentators  with  contempt :  "  it  is  not  easy 
to  discover  from  what  cause  the  acrimony  of 
a  scholiast  can  naturally  proceed.  The 
subjects  to  be  discussed  by  him  are  of  very 
small  importance :  they  involve  neither 
property  nor  liberty  " ;   and  in  another  place 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  217 

he  characteristically  bids  his  angry  colleagues 
to  join  with  him  in  remembering  amidst  their 
triumphs  over  the  "  nonsensical  "  opinions 
of  dead  rivals  that  "  we  likewise  are  men  : 
that  debemur  morti,  and,  as  Swift  observed  to 
Burnet,  we  shall  soon  be  among  the  dead  our- 
selves." He  knows  too  that  "  notes  are 
necessary  evils  "  and  advises  the  young  reader 
to  begin  by  ignoring  them  and  letting  Shake- 
speare have  his  way  alone.  But  at  the  same 
time  he  puts  aside  with  just  indignation  Pope's 
supercilious  talk  about  the  "  dull  duty  of  an 
editor " ;  and  after  giving  an  admirable 
summary  of  what  that  dull  duty  is,  declares 
that  one  part  of  it  alone,  the  business  of 
conjectural  criticism,  "demands  more  than 
humanity  possesses."  Yet  it  is  that  part  of 
his  functions,  the  part  which  appeals  most 
to  vanity,  that  he  exercised  with  the  most 
sparing  caution.  He  saw  that  it  was  not  in 
emendation  but  in  interpretation  that  the 
critic  could  now  be  most  useful.  For  this 
last  task  the  sanity  of  his  mind,  though  some- 
times leaning  too  much  to  prose,  gave  him 
peculiar  qualifications.  No  one  can  hare 
used  any  of  the  Variorum  Shakespeares  with- 
out being  struck  again  and  again  by  the 
masterly  way  in  which  Johnson  penetrates 
through  the  thicket  of  obscurities  raised  by 
Shakespeare's    involved    language    and    his 


218    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

critics'  fanciful  explanations,  and  brings  back 
for  us  in  plain  words  the  undoubted  meaning 
of  many  a  difficult  passage.  He  is  a  master 
of  that  rare  art,  the  prose  paraphrase  of 
poetry.  The  perfect  lucidity  of  his  notes 
makes  them  always  a  pleasure  to  read  :  and 
writers  of  notes  are  not  usually  masters  of 
language.  Take  such  a  note  as  that  on  the 
words  of  Laertes  about  Ophelia's  madness — 

*'  Nature  is  fine  in  love  :  and,  where  'tis  fine, 
It  sends  some  precious  instance  of  itself 
After  the  thing  it  loves." 

Johnson  interprets  :  "  love  is  the  passion  by 
which  nature  is  most  exalted  and  refined; 
and  as  substances,  refined  and  subtilized, 
easily  obey  any  impulse,  or  follow  any  attrac- 
tion, some  part  of  nature,  so  purified  and 
refined,  flies  off  after  the  attracting  object, 
after  the  thing  it  loves; — 

"  As  into  air  the  purer  spirits  flow. 
And  separate  from  their  kindred  dregs  below, 
So  flew  her  soul." 

Nor  can  a  mistake  or  two  in  details  detract 
from  the  value  of  the  splendid  paraphrase  of 
"To  be  or  not  to  be,"  or  the  admirable  note 
on  the  character  of  Polonius.  Shakespeare 
has  had  subtler  and  more  poetical  critics  than 
Johnson  :  but  no  one  has  equalled  the  insight. 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  219 

sobriety,  lucidity  and  finality  which  Johnson 
shows  in  his  own  field. 

The  Lives  of  the  Poets  is  Johnson's  last, 
longest,  and  most  popular  work.  More  than 
any  other  of  his  works  it  was  wi-itten  to  please 
himself  :  he  did  so  much  more  than  he  was 
paid  to  do  that  he  almost  refuted  his  own 
doctrine  that  no  man  but  a  blockhead  ever 
wrote  except  for  money.  Instead  of  being 
written,  like  most  of  his  earlier  books,  in 
poverty,  if  not  in  obscurity,  the  Lives  were 
wi'itten  at  his  ease,  with  his  pension  in  his 
pocket,  with  the  booksellers  at  his  feet,  with 
the  consciousness  of  an  expectant  and  admiring 
public  outside.  The  obstructions  to  his  work 
were  no  longer  those  of  poverty  but  of  pros- 
perity. He  once  had  to  write  because  if  he 
did  not  he  would  starve  :  now  he  might  sleep 
or  talk  all  day  with  the  certainty  of  sitting 
down  to  more  meals  than  he  wanted.  In 
early  life  he  had  no  temptation  to  quit  his 
home,  for  he  could  not  afford  travel  or  amuse- 
ment :  now  he  could  go  to  the  Hebrides  and 
talk  of  going  further,  without  taking  much 
thought  of  the  expense.  He  once  worked  to 
make  his  name  known  :  now  his  reputation 
was  established  and  his  name  better  known 
than  he  always  found  convenient.  The  result 
is  that  the  Lives  are  easily  written,  full  of 
anecdote  and  incident  and  manners,  full  of 


220    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

easily  traceable  allusions  to  himself  and  his 
own  experiences,  full  of  the  magisterial 
decisions  of  a  man  whose  judgments  are  no 
longer  questioned,  full,  even  more  than  usual, 
of  frank  confessions,  open  disregard  of  estab- 
lished opinion,  the  pleasant  refusals  of  a  wilful 
old  man  to  reconsider  his  prejudices  or  take 
any  more  trouble  about  his  work  than  he 
happens  to  choose.  All  this  increases  the 
readableness  of  the  book.  But  it  does  not 
all  increase  its  importance,  and  the  fact  is  that 
not  even  the  greatest  of  the  Lives  is  as  fine  a 
piece  of  work  as  the  Preface  to  the  Shakespeare. 
Moreover,  the  work  as  a  whole  suffers  from  a 
disadvantage  from  which  the  Shakespeare  is 
conspicuously  exempt.  It  deals  very  largely 
with  matters  in  which  scarcely  any  one  now 
takes  any  interest.  In  its  three  volumes 
Johnson  gives  us  biographical  and  critical 
studies  of  fifty-two  poets.  Of  these  only  six — 
Milton,  Dryden,  Pope,  Thomson,  Collins  and 
Gray — would  now  be  considered  of  first-rate 
poetic  importance.  Of  the  rest  it  is  difficult 
to  make- certain  of  a  dozen  whose  place  in  the 
second  class  would  be  unquestioned.  The 
thirty  or  more  that  remain  are  mostly  poets 
of  whom  the  ordinary  reader  of  to-day  has 
never  read,  and  if  he  is  wise  will  never  read, 
a  single  line.  Great  part  of  the  book  therefore 
is  criticism  not  only  upon  the  unimportant  but 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  221 

upon  what,  so  far  as  we  are  now  concerned, 
may  be  called  the  non-existent.  And  even  in 
Johnson's  hands  that  cannot  but  mean  barren 
writing  and  empty  reading. 

Yet  the  Lives  of  the  Poets  is  not  only  the 
most  popular  book  of  its  kind  in  the  language  : 
It  is  also  a  book  of  real  and  permanent  value. 
No  short  Lives  have  ever  equalled  them.  The 
most  insignificant  of  the  poets  acquires  a 
momentary  interest  as  he  passes  through 
Johnson's  hands.  The  art  of  biography  is 
that  of  giving  life  to  the  dead  :  and  that  can 
only  be  done  by  the  living.  No  one  was  ever 
more  alive  than  Johnson.  He  says  himself 
that  he  wrote  his  Lives  unwillingly  but  with 
vigour  and  haste.  The  haste  is  apparent  in 
a  few  places  :  the  vigour  everywhere.  He  had 
more  pleasure  in  the  biographical  part  of  his 
work  than  in  the  critical,  and  consequently  did 
it  better.  His  strong  love  of  life  in  all  its 
manifestations  prevented  his  ever  treating  an 
author  merely  as  an  author.  He  always  goes 
straight  to  the  man.  And  he  knows  that  the 
individuality  which  makes  the  life  of  portraits 
is  a  matter  of  detail.  Consequently  he  takes 
pains  to  record  every  detail  that  he  can  collect 
about  his  poets.  The  clothes  of  Milton,  the 
chair  Dryden  occupied  and  its  situation  in 
summer  and  in  winter.  Pope's  silver  saucepan 


222    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

and  potted  lampreys,  the  reason  why  Addison 
sometimes  absented  himself  from  Button's,  the 
remark  which  Swift  made  to  Lord  Orrery 
about  a  servant's  faults  in  waiting  at  table 
and  which  Lord  Orrery  himself  related  to 
Johnson,  these  things  and  a  hundred  like  them 
make  Johnson's  little  biographies  among  the 
most  vivid  in  the  world.  When  once  we  have 
read  them  the  poets  they  describe  are  for  ever 
delivered  from  the  remoteness  of  mere  fame. 
Johnson  has  gone  very  close  to  them  and  he 
has  taken  us  with  him.  And  to  have  got  close 
to  men  like  Dryden,  Pope,  Swift  and  Addison 
is  not  among  the  smaller  experiences  of  life. 
Two  of  them  may  indeed  seem  to  us  not  to  be 
poets  at  all,  and  the  other  two,  possessing  in 
such  splendid  abundance  so  many  of  a  great 
poet's  gifts,  to  have  lacked  the  greatest  and 
most  essential  of  all  :  but  great  men  the  whole 
four  undoubtedly  were,  among  the  greatest 
and  most  representative  in  the  England  of 
the  century  between  the  death  of  IMilton  and 
the  birth  of  Wordsworth.  , 

And  Johnson  belonged  whole-heartedly  to 
that  century,  lived  in  it,  knew  it  more  in- 
timately perhaps  than  any  man,  believed  in 
it  and  loved  it  without  ever  the  shadow  of  a 
fear  that  there  might  be  revolutionary  sur- 
prises in  store  for  the  complacent  self-assurance 
of  its  attitude  towards  literature,  society  and 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  223 

life.  These  were  plainly  unusual  qualifications 
for  interpreting  its  great  men  to  us.  And  when 
to  these  qualifications  is  added,  as  it  was  in 
Johnson's  case,  a  mind  of  great  power,  and 
great  pleasure  in  using  its  power,  and  a  gift 
of  expression  which  has  seldom  been  surpassed, 
it  is  evident  that  a  book  like  the  Lives  is  certain 
to  be,  what  it  is,  one  of  the  great  monuments 
and  landmarks  of  our  literature.  No  literary- 
excursionist  who  has  travelled  to  look  at  it 
has  ever  regretted  his  journey.  For  there  is 
in  it  the  mind  of  a  whole  age  :  yet  not  fossilized 
or  mummified  as  in  other  hands  it  might  so 
easily  have  become  by  now,  as  the  mind  of 
any  age  must  soon  become  when  it  is  left 
entirely  to  itself.  Johnson  did  not  leave  it 
entirely  to  itself.  It  is  true  that  in  all  matters 
of  political  or  literary  controversy  his  mind  was 
narrowly  imprisoned  in  the  opinions  of  his  own 
or  his  father's  age  :  and  that  is  what  makes 
him  such  an  admirable  witness  to  them ;  but 
here  as  elsewhere  the  life-giving  quality  in  him 
lies  in  his  hold  on  the  universal  human  things 
which  are  affected  by  no  controversies  and 
belong  to  all  the  ages.  None  of  his  books 
exhibit  more  of  what  he  himself  calls  "  the 
two  most  engaging  powers  of  an  author." 
In  it  "  new  things  are  made  familiar  and 
familiar  things  are  made  new."  The  famous 
criticism  of  the  "  metaphysical  poets  "  is  so 


224    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

written  that  a  plain  man  feels  at  home  in  it : 
the  thrice -told  tale  of  the  lives  of  Pope  and 
Addison  is  so  retold  that  every  one  thinks  he 
reads  it  for  the  first  time.  The  man  who  had 
in  his  earlier  works  sometimes  seemed  the 
most  general  and  abstract  even  of  eighteenth- 
century  writers,  becomes  here,  by  force  of  his 
interest  in  the  primary  things  of  humanity, 
almost  a  pioneer  of  the  new  love  of  externali- 
ties, a  relater  of  details,  an  anticipator  of  his 
own  Bos  well. 

To  the  critical  discussions  he  gave  less  space 
than  to  the  lives,  and  no  one  will  pretend  to 
wish  he  had  done  the  opposite.  Allusion  has 
already  been  made  to  his  limitations  as  a 
critic  of  poetry.  He  was  blind  to  the  most 
poetic  qualities  of  the  greatest  men  :  the 
purest  poetry,  the  poetry  that  has  refined  away 
all  but  the  absolutely  indispensable  minimum 
of  prose  alloy,  often  escaped  him  altogether, 
sometimes  simply  irritated  his  prejudices. 
Omne  ignotum  pro  injucundo.  He  found  people 
enthusiastic  admirers  of  Milton's  Lycidas  or 
Gray's  Odes,  was  angry  at  others  enjoying 
what  he  found  no  pleasure  in,  and  vented 
his  temper  on  Gray  and  Milton.  Though 
Collins  was  his  friend  he  makes  no  mention  of 
the  Ode  to  Evening.  In  these  cases  and  some 
others  the  critic  is  much  less  scrupulously  fair 
than  the  biographer,  to  tell  the  truth,  nearly 


JOHNSON'S   WORKS  225 

always  is  There  is  perhaps  a  maheious  touch 
here  and  there  in  the  hves  of  Milton,  Swift  and 
Gray  :  but  little  as  he  liked  any  of  them,  how 
fairly  in  each  case  the  good  points  of  the  man 
are  brought  out,  and  how  they  are  left  at 
the  end  quite  overbalancing  the  rest  in  our 
memories  !  But  in  the  case  of  their  works  it 
is  different.  He  has  little  to  say  about  Gray's 
Elegy,  which  he  admired,  and  much  about  his 
Odes,  which  he  disliked. 

Yet,  in  spite  of  some  incapacity  and  some 
unfairness,  Johnson's  criticism  of  poe<try  is 
still  a  thing  to  be  read  with  interest,  profit 
and  admiration.  After  all  poetry  is  an  art 
as  well  as  an  inspiration :  it  may  almost  be 
said  to  be  a  business  as  well  as  a  pleasure. 
There  is  still,  when  all  has  been  said,  that 
indispensable  alloy  of  prose  in  its  composition 
without  which  it  crumbles  into  fragments,  or 
evaporates  into  mere  mist.  The  critical 
questions  which  Horace  and  Boileau  and 
Pope  discuss  do  not  include  the  highest : 
but  they  include  much  that  no  poet  can  put 
aside  as  beneath  him.  In  this  field  Johnson 
ranks  among  the  masters  of  criticism.  His 
mind  did  not  travel  outside  its  limits,  but  to 
the  work  to  be  done  within  them  it  brought 
knowledge,  reflection,  vigour  and  acuteness. 
His  reading  had  shown  him  how  the  writing 

of  verses,  the  construction  of  sentences,  the 
p 


226    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

effective  use  of  words,  had  advanced  from  the 
uncouthness  and  extravagance  of  the  EHza- 
bethans  and  Jacobeans  to  the  amazing  brevity, 
finish  and  dexterity  of  Pope.  It  is  good  for 
us  to  see  it  too  with  his  eyes.  We  are  apt  to 
see  only  the  beauty  and  truth  that  were  lost 
in  the  process,  and  the  mechanical  clockwork 
that  followed  upon  its  completion.  These  he 
could  not  see  ;  but  we  are  in  no  danger  of 
forgetting  them,  while  we  are  in  danger  of 
forgetting  that  Pope's  achievement  gave  us 
the  most  quotable  verse  that  ever  was  wTitten, 
and  that  his  brilliancy  and  wit  quickened  the 
powers  of  expression  of  a  whole  nation.  To 
understand  this  is  well  worth  while  :  and 
Johnson  helps  us  to  understand  it.  Nor  will 
the  fact  of  his  thinking  that  Pope  improved 
upon  Homer  and  that  his  translation  is  a 
model  of  melody,  do  us  any  harm  :  for  we 
are  not  likely  to  follow  him  in  either  opinion. 
As  literary  criticism  the  greatest  of  the 
Lives  are  those  of  Cowley,  Dryden  and  Pope. 
But  Johnson  is  not  to  be  altogether  despised 
even  where  he  is  plainly  inadequate.  Some  of 
his  strictures  upon  the  poets  whom  he  did  not 
understand  are  sound  enough  in  themselves  : 
there  is  little  to  say  against  them  except  that 
they  stand  alone.  The  defect  in  his  criticism 
of  Lycidas  is  not  that  he  attacks  the  mytho- 
logical confusion  of  the  poem — which  is  in  fact 


JOHNSON'S   WORKS  227 

its  weakness,  not  its  strength ;  but  that  he  gives 
no  hint  of  sensibihty  to  its  haunting  beauty  of 
phrase,  of  melody,  of  association,  of  passionate 
feehng,  not  perhaps  for  its  nominal  subject, 
but  for  the  brief  life  of  human  friendship,  for 
the  mingled  tragedy  of  love  and  fame  and 
death.  So  again  with  Collins  and  Gray. 
Johnson  is  perfectly  right  in  saying  that 
Collins  is  too  harsh  and  obscure,  too  apt  to 
lose  his  way  "  in  quest  of  mistaken  beauties  "  : 
where  he  is  wrong  is  in  not  saying  that  he 
produced  one  of  the  most  perfect  Odes  in  our 
own  or  any  other  language.  And  even  in 
Gray's  case,  where  he  is  at  his  worst,  there  are 
things  which  an  intelligent  lover  of  Gray  is  the 
better  for  reading.  There  had  been  a  good 
deal  of  unintelligent  and  too  promiscuous 
admiration  of  Gray's  Odes  in  Johnson's  day  : 
and  he  performed  a  service,  which  is  still  a 
service,  by  pointing  out  that  there  is  in  some 
of  their  phrases  a  certain  element  of  affectation 
and  artificiality.  It  is  true,  and  still  necessary 
to  be  said,  that  Gray's  "  art  and  struggle  are 
too  visible,  and  that  there  is  in  his  Odes  too 
little  appearance  of  ease  and  nature."  The 
object  of  criticism  is  the  whole  of  truth  :  and 
to  see  only  the  imaginative  power,  the  metrical 
learning  and  skill,  the  gift  of  language,  the 
gift  of  emotion,  in  Gray,  is  not  to  see  the  whole. 
It  is  more  important  to  see  these  things  than 

P  2 


228    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

to  see  what  Johnson  saw  :  but  in  a  complete 
criticism  of  Gray  room  must  be  found  for  an 
allusion  to  that  element  in  him  of  which 
Johnson  saj^s,  with  some  truth  as  well  as 
malice  :  "  he  has  a  kind  of  stnitting  dignity 
and  is  tall  by  walking  on  tiptoe."  In  these 
matters  we  may  listen  with  advantage  to 
Johnson's  instinct  for  reality ;  as  we  also  may 
to  his  knowledge  of  the  art  of  letters,  when  he 
points  out  quite  truly  that  Samson  Agonistes 
has  no  plot,  and  when  he  puts  his  finger  at 
once  on  that  central  defect  of  Paradise  Lost 
that  "  it  comprises  neither  human  actions  nor 
human  manners."  That  is  too  broadly  stated 
no  doubt  :  but  it  is  true  that  the  subject  of 
poetry  is  the  free  play  of  human  life,  and  that, 
from  supernatural  interference  and  from  the 
peculiar  position  of  Adam  and  Eve,  there  is  far 
too  little  of  this  in  Paradise  Lost.  Nor  was  it 
likely  that  a  man  of  Johnson's  learning  and 
power  of  mind  would  confine  himself  in  a  book 
of  this  kind  to  the  mere  praise  and  blame  of  a 
succession  of  writers.  That  is  his  principal 
business  :  but  of  course  he  constantly  over- 
flows into  general  topics  bearing  upon  litera- 
ture or  poetry  as  a  whole.  In  these  everybody 
who  cares  to  think  about  the  art  of  wiiting 
or  analyse  the  pleasures  of  reading  will  find 
his  account  :  they  come  in  everywhere,  of 
course.     Now  he  makes  some  shrewd  remarks, 


JOHNSON'S  WORKS  229 

not  so  much  needed  by  the  poets  of  his  day 
as  by  the  novehsts  of  our  own,  about  the  danger 
of  detailed  enumeration  by  which  description 
so  often  loses  all  its  power :  for  "  of  the  greatest 
things  the  parts  are  little."  Now  he  is 
incidentally  laying  down  the  true  ideal  of  the 
translator :  to  "  exhibit  his  author's  thoughts 
in  such  a  dress  of  diction  as  the  author  would 
have  given  them,  had  his  language  been 
English."  Now  he  is  discoursing  at  length 
on  what  it  was  Wordworth's  misfortune  never 
fully  to  understand,  the  immense  power  of 
association  upon  words,  so  that  the  greatest 
thoughts  and  noblest  emotions  fail  of  their 
effect  if  expressed  in  words  ordinarily  connected 
with  trivial,  vulgar,  or  ignoble  actions,  and 
therefore  necessarily  arousing  in  the  reader  a 
state  of  mind  unfit  for  the  reception  of  great- 
ness. Or  again  he  will  speak  of  the  value  of 
surprise  in  hterature;  "the  pleasures  of  the 
mind  imply  something  sudden  and  unex- 
pected." Or  he  will  enlarge,  as  in  the  Life  of 
Addison,  upon  the  definition  of  a  simile,  the 
use  of  similes  in  poetry,  and  the  distinction 
between  them  and  what  he  calls  "exemplifi- 
cations " ;  or,  as  in  that  of  Pope,  upon  the 
subject  of  representative  metres  and  onoma- 
topoeic words.  No  one  will  pretend  that  all 
he  says  in  these  general  excursions  is  final  : 
but  it  is  always  the  work  of  a  man  who  had 


230    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

read  a  great  deal  and  had  applied  a  very 
vigorous  mind  to  what  he  had  read.  For  all 
these  reasons  the  Lives  of  the  Poets  will  always 
be  eagerly  read  by  those  who  wish  to  under- 
stand a  great  man  and  a  great  period  of  Eng- 
lish literature.  But  they  will  be  read  sfeill 
more  for  their  pleasantness,  humanity  and 
wisdom. 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE   FRIENDS    OF   JOHNSON 

Johnson  thought  human  life  in  general, 
and  his  own  in  particular,  an  unhappy  busi- 
ness. Boswell  once  urged,  in  reply  to  his 
melancholy,  that  in  fact  life  was  lived  upon 
the  supposition  of  happiness  ;  houses  are 
built,  gardens  laid  out,  places  of  amusement 
erected  and  filled  with  company,  and  these 
things  would  not  be  done  if  people  did  not 
expect  to  enjoy  themselves.  As  so  often 
happens  in  these  arguments  Boswell  appears 
to  us  to  be  substantially  right.  But  the 
only  reply  he  drew  from  Johnson  was,  "  Alas, 
sir,  these  are  all  only  struggles  for  happiness." 
And  he  went  on  to  give  a  curious  illustration 
of  his  rooted  conviction  that  every  man 
knew  himself  to  be  unhappy  if  he  stopped  to 


THE   FRIENDS   OF  JOHNSON    231 

think  about  it.  "  Wlien  I  first  entered 
Ranelagh  it  gave  an  expansion  and  gay- 
sensation  to  my  mind  such  as  I  never  experi- 
enced anywhere  else.  But,  as  Xerxes  wept 
when  he  viewed  his  immense  army  and  con- 
sidered that  not  one  of  that  great  multitude 
would  be  alive  a  hundred  years  afterwards, 
so  it  went  to  my  heart  to  consider  that  there 
was  not  one  in  all  that  brilliant  circle  that 
was  not  afraid  to  go  home  and  think  :  but 
that  the  thoughts  of  each  individual  there 
would  be  distressing  when  alone."  What  he 
thought  was  true  of  all  men  was  certainly- 
true  of  himself.  He  hated  and  dreaded  to 
be  alone.  It  was  the  pain  of  solitude  quite 
as  much  as  the  pleasure  of  society  that  drove 
him  abroad,  and  induced  him  to  make  a 
business  of  keeping  alive  old  friendships  and 
procuring  new,  till  he  had  formed  as  large  and 
as  interesting  a  circle  of  acquaintances  as  any- 
English  man  of  letters  has  ever  had. 

That  fact  is  an  important  element  in  his 
fame.  A  great  talker  cannot  exert  his  talent 
in  solitude ;  he  cannot  properly  exert  it  except 
in  a  society  of  intelligent  men  who  can  under- 
stand, appreciate,  and  in  some  degree  contend 
■with.  him.  Johnson  would  not  have  been  the 
wonderful  talker  he  was  if  he  had  lived  like 
Richardson  among  gaping  women  and  stupid 


232    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

toadies.  He  did  the  very  opposite.  He 
lived  among  men  several  of  whom  possessed 
powers  of  mind  quite  as  great  as  his  own, 
however  different,  while  their  achievements 
seem  to  posterity  decidedly  greater  than  his. 
Our  impression  of  his  overwhelming  distinc- 
tion as  a  talker  is  not  derived  only  from  our 
own  judgment  as  we  read  Boswell's  record  of 
it.  It  is  derived  almost  as  much  from  the 
fact  that  men  so  great  as  those  he  lived 
with  acknowledged  it  with  one  accord.  The 
primacy  of  Johnson  was  among  them  all  an 
unquestioned  article  of  faith.  Hawkins,  who 
knew  him  for  so  many  years,  says  of  him 
that  "  as  Alexander  and  Caesar  were  born 
for  conquest,  so  was  Johnson  for  the  office 
of  a  symposiarch,  to  preside  in  all  conversa- 
tions " ;  and  he  adds,  "  I  never  yet  saw  the 
man  who  would  venture  to  contest  his  right." 
But  the  greatest  tribute  came  from  the  greatest 
of  his  friends.  When  Langdon,  walking  home 
one  evening  with  Burke  after  both  had  dined 
in  Johnson's  company,  regretted  that  Johnson 
had  seized  upon  all  the  topics  started  by 
Burke,  so  that  Burke  himself  had  said  little 
upon  them,  the  reply  of  Burke  is  well  known, 
"  Oh,  no ;  it  is  enough  for  me  to  have  rung 
the  bell  to  him."  Such  words  from  such  a 
man  are  final  and  unanswerable.  And  they 
are  confirmed  by  every  other  member  of   his 


THE   FRIENDS  OF  JOHNSON    233 

inner  circle,  and  indeed  by  almost  every 
person  who  knew  him  and  has  left  any  opinion 
on  the  subject.  Not  the  least  significant 
tribute  is  that  of  those — including  men  no 
less  great  than  Gibbon  and  Fox — who  had  not 
the  courage  to  ring  that  dangerous  bell  which 
so  often  was  brought  down  upon  the  head  of 
the  ringer.  Ili&,ll..mauiei:-and  astoniahment  " 
he  inspired  were  universal;  and  among  those 
who  really  knew  him  they  were  commonly 
mingled  with  love.  But  whether  there  were 
love  or  not  there  was_generally  some  degree 
of  awe,  even  of  actual  fear,  as  apparently 
in  the  ^ase  of  Gibbon.  The  unquestioned 
ascendency,  he  possessed  and  exercised  over  > 
men_aild  women  not  accustomed  to  be  over- 
awed is,_43laiiily  written  all  over  Boswell's 
story.  The  most  celebrated  of  the  scenes 
that  prove  or  exhibit  it  is  no  doubt  that  of 
the  signing  ol  the  "  Round  Robin  "  at  Sir 
Joshua  Reynolds's  house  in  1776,  when  a 
company  which  included,  besides  Reynolds 
himself,  Burke^  Gibbon,  Sheridan,  Colman, 
'^'  y^I^9J!^.f J^F^  Barnard,  afterwards  Bishop 
of  Kj]lalQ£»-Were  anxious  to  protest  to  Johnson 
against  his  proposed  Latin  Epitaph  on  Gold- 
smith; but  not  one  dared  to  approach  him 
about  it  or  even  to  be  thefirst  to  sign  a  letter 
to  be  sent  to  him.  So  a  sailors'  Round  Robin, 
drawn  up  by  Burke,  was  adopted,  and  all  the 


234    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

signatures  ran  round  it  in  equal  daring.  But 
the  same  thing  appears  perhaps  even  more 
curiously  in  a  remark  of  Boswell's  about  a 
dinner  at  the  house  of  Allan  Ramsay.  The 
company  included  Reynolds,  Robertson  the 
historian.  Lord  Binning  and  Boswell ;  and, 
Johnson  being  late  in  coming,  they  took  to 
discussing  hira  and  his  character.  Soon,  of 
course,  he  made  his  appearance ;  and  then, 
says  Boswell,  "  no  sooner  did  he,  of  whom 
we  had  been  thus  talking  so  easily,  arrive, 
than  we  were  all  as  quiet  as  a  school  upon 
the  entrance  of  the  head-master."  The  best 
parallel  perhaps  to  Johnson's  position  in  his 
social  world  is  that  of  the  elder  Pitt  in  Parlia- 
ment. In  each  case  the  awe  which  was  felt 
was  much  more  than  a  mere  vulgar  fear  of 
punishment;  there  was  that  in  it,  no  doubt; 
but  there  was  also  a  much  rarer  and  finer 
thing ;  what  we  can  only  describe  vaguely  as 
a  consciousness  of  the  presence  of  greatness. 
It  is  worth  while  to  look  a  little  more 
closely  at  the  composition  of  this  society  in 
which  Johnson  reigned  as  unquestioned  king. 
The  most  remarkable  thing  of  all  about  it 
is  that  its  inner  and  most  intimate  circle 
included  four  men  of  genius.  Johnson  had 
few  or  no  closer  friends  than  Reynolds,  Burke, 
Goldsmith  and  Boswell.  Of  these  the  first 
two    were    acknowledged    as    the    greatest 


THE   FRIENDS   OF  JOHNSON    235 

painter  and  the  greatest  orator  then  living 
in  England  or  perhaps  in  Europe ;  the  third, 
when  he  died,  had  some  claim  to  be  the  truest 
poet;  and,  what  is  more  remarkable,  the 
lapse  of  over  a  hundred  years  has  found  little 
or  nothing  to  detract  from  the  fame  each 
won  from  his  contemporaries.  Of  Bos  well 
it  is  enough  to  repeat  that,  while  he  could  not 
compare  with  these  men  in  life  or  action  or 
general  powers  of  mind,  and  therefore  enjoyed 
no  contemporary  fame,  he  left  a  book  behind 
him  at  his  death  which  every  succeeding 
generation  has  increasingly  recognized  as 
possessing  that  uniqueness  of  achievement 
which  is  another  phrase  for  genius.  Four 
such  men  alone  would  make  a  society  such 
as  few  men  have  lived  in.  But  Johnson's 
society  is  as  remarkable  for  the  variety  and 
quantit}^,  as  for  the  quality,  of  its  distinction. 
No  one  can  look  through  the  invaluable  index 
of  Dr.  Birkbeck  Hill's  edition  of  Boswell 
without  being  struck  by  this.  If  one  were  to 
make  a  list  of  all  the  people  whom  Johnson 
saw  frequently  or  occasionally  in  the  course 
of  his  life  it  would  include  an  astonishing 
number  of  interesting  names.  Part  of  the 
fascination  of  Boswell's  book  lies  in  that. 
It  is  first  and  foremost  the  portrait  of  a  man, 
and  everything  is  kept  in  subordination  to 
*;hat.     But  it  is  also  the  picture  of  a  whole 


236    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

age  and  country.  Sir  Leslie  Stephen  re- 
marked that  nearly  every  distinguished  man 
of  letters  of  that  time  came  into  contact  with 
Johnson.  He  mentions  Hume  and  Gray  as 
the  only  exceptions.  There  may  be  others, 
as  for  instance  Sterne,  to  be  added.  But  it 
remains  true  that  Johnson  was  in  exception- 
[ally  close  personal  touch  with  the  whole 
literary  world  of  his  day.  And  Boswell  has 
known  how  to  make  use  of  all  that  to  give 
interest  and  variety  to  his  book.  Nor  was 
Johnson  ever,  as  we  have  seen,  a  mere  narrow 
man  of  letters.  He  had  a  universal  curiosity 
about  life  and  men.  He  could  talk  to  every 
one,  and  every  one  found  his  talk  interesting. 
Consequently  Bos  well's  record  of  his  acquaint- 
ance is  by  no  means  a  mere  series  of  literary 
portraits.  The  society  is  of  all  the  sorts  of 
men  and  women  that  intelligent  men  can 
care  to  meet,  the  talk  on  almost  all  the 
subjects  which  such  people  can  care  to 
discuss. 

Let  us  glance  at  some  of  the  names  that 
would  find  places  in  that  list.  We  may  begin 
with  the  statesmen.  There  is  first  of  all 
Shelburne,  who  was  Prime  Minister  the  year 
before  Johnson  died;  the  most  mysterious 
figure  in  the  politics  of  that  day,  George  Ill's 
Jesuit  of  Berkeley  Square,  the  "  Malagrida  *' 
of    the   pamphleteers,   to    whom   Goldsmith 


THE   FRIENDS   OF  JOHNSON    237 

made  his  well-known  unfortunate  remark,  "  I 
never  could  conceive  the  reason  why  they 
call  you  Malagrida,  for  Malagrida  was  a  very 
good  sort  of  man."  But  for  all  this  sinister 
reputation  he  was  certainly  an  able  and  in- 
teresting man.  He  was  a  great  patron  of  the 
arts,  a  princely  collector  of  manuscripts,  and 
an  unusually  enlightened  student  of  politics 
if  not  a  great  statesman.  How  intimately 
Johnson  knew  him  is,  like  almost  everything 
about  Shelburne,  uncertain;  but  it  is  known 
that  they  used  to  meet  in  London  and  that 
Johnson  once  at  least  was  Shclburne's  guest 
at  Bo  wood.  A  greater  man  who  was  never 
Prime  Minister  was  a  much  more  intimate 
friend.  Fox  talked  little  before  Johnson; 
and  the  two  men  were  as  different  in  many 
ways  as  men  could  be.  Of  the  two  it  was 
certainly  not  the  professed  man  of  letters 
who  was  the  greater  lover  of  literature. 
But  Fox  was  a  member  of  "  The  Club,"  and  an 
intimate  friend  of  Burke  and  Reynolds,  and 
in  these  ways  he  and  Johnson  often  met. 
In  spite  of  all  differences  each,  made  a  great 
impression  on  the  other.  Fox  indignantly 
defended  Johnson's  pension  in  the  House  of 
Commons  so  early  as  1774,  and  the  last  book 
read  to  him,  except  the  Church  Service,  was 
Johnson's  Lives  of  the  Poets.  Johnson  was 
like  the  rest  of  the  world  dazzled  by  the  daring 


238    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS  CHICLE 

parliamentary  genius  of  Fox,  and  said  that 
he  had  "  divided  the  kingdom  with  Csesar 
so  that  there  was  a  doubt  whether  the  nation 
should  be  ruled  by  the  sceptre  of  George  III 
or  the  tongue  of  Fox."  He  was  for  the  King 
against  Fox,  because  the  King  was  his 
"master,"  but  for  Fox  against  Pitt  because 
"  Fox  is  my  friend." 

Another  contemporary  statesman  who  was 
intimate  with  Johnson  was  the  cultivated 
and  high-minded  William  Windham.  No 
one  had  a  greater  reverence  for  Johnson. 
The  most  scrupulous  of  men,  he  was  probably 
attracted  to  Johnson  most  of  all  by  his 
character,  and  sought  in  him  a  kind  of  director 
for  his  conscience.  Johnson,  however,  dis- 
approved of  scruples,  and  when  Windham 
expressed,  as  Boswell  says,  "  some  modest 
and  virtuous  doubts  "  whether  he  ought  to 
accept  the  post  of  Secretary  to  the  Lord 
Lieutenant  of  Ireland  because  of  the  dubious 
practices  supposed  to  be  necessary  to  the 
holding  of  that  office,  all  the  answer  he  got 
was  "  a  pleasant  smile  "  and  "  Don't  be 
afraid,  sir,  you  will  soon  make  a  very  pretty 
rascal."  But  Windham  took  no  discourage- 
ments and  was  to  the  end  one  of  Johnson's 
most  devoted  disciples.  He  put  such  a 
value  on  Johnson's  society  that  he  once  rode 
forty  miles  out  of  his  way  on  a  journey  in 


THE   FRIENDS  OF  JOHNSON    239 

order  to  get  a  day  and  a  half  with  him  at 
Ashbourne  :  and  he  was  one  of  the  Httle  band 
of  friends  who  constantly  visited  the  dying 
man  in  the  last  days  of  his  life.  One  day 
when  he  had  placed  a  pillow  to  support  the 
old  man's  head,  Johnson  thanked  him  and 
said,  "  That  will  do — all  that  a  pillow  can 
do."  He  was  one  of  the  pall-bearers  at  the 
funeral. 

A  less  tamous  political  friend  was  William 
Gerard  Hamilton,  with  whom  he  at  one  time 
engaged  in  political  work  of  some  sort  serious 
enough  to  induce  him  to  write  a  special 
prayer  about  it.  "Single  speech  Hamilton," 
as  he  was  called,  behaved  badly  to  Burke 
and  was,  it  seems,  widely  distrusted;  but 
Johnson  maintained  a  life-long  friendship 
with  him,  and  had  a  high  opinion  of  his 
conversational  powers.  Hamilton  in  return 
thought  that  he  found  in  Johnson,  when  not 
talking  for  victory,  a  "  wisdom  not  only  con- 
vincing but  overpowering  " ;  and  showed  his 
gratitude  by  placing  his  purse  at  Johnson's 
disposal  when  he  supposed  him  to  be  in  want 
of  money.  It  was  he — a  man  of  public 
business  and  affairs  all  his  life — who  said  of 
Johnson's  death  that  it  had  "  made  a  chasm 
which  not  only  nothing  can  fill  up,  but  which 
nothing  has  a  tendency  to  fill  up.  Johnson 
is  dead.     Let  us  go  to  the  next  best  :  there  is 


240    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

nobody;  no  man  can  be  said  to  put  you  in 
mind  of  Johnson."  So  also  thought  another 
member  of  Parhament,  George  Dempster, 
whom  Burns  honoured  with  his  praise.  He 
once  told  Boswell  not  to  think  of  his  health, 
but  to  sit  up  all  night  listening  to  Johnson ; 
for  "  one  had  better  be  palsied  at  eighteen 
than  not  keep  company  with  such  a  man." 
Another  politician  in  his  circle  was  Fitz- 
Herbert,  a  man  of  whom  Burke  had  the 
highest  opinion,  and  of  whom  Johnson  made 
the  curious  remark  that  he  was  the  most 
"  acceptable  of  men  because  his  good  qualities 
were  negative  and  he  offended  no  one."  Fitz- 
Herbert  spoke  of  Johnson  in  the  House  of 
Commons  as  his  friend  and  called  him  "  a 
pattern  of  morality." 

Two  other  well-known  political  figures  may 
be  mentioned  as  acquaintances  of  Johnson; 
both  men  of  more  ability  than  character. 
Lord  Chancellor  Thurlow  was  a  type  of  the 
lawyer  who  fights  his  way  to  success  and 
cares  for  little  else.  But  he  was  a  true  and 
generous  friend  to  Johnson,  for  whose  pro- 
posed journey  to  Italy  he  offered  to  provide 
the  means.  And  if  his  career  allowed  any 
one  to  think  meanly  of  his  abilities,  Johnson's 
opinion  of  them  would  be  a  ;sufficient  answer. 
He  always  maintained  that  "  to  make  a 
speech  in  a  public  assembly  is  a  knack  " ;  it 


THE   FRIENDS  OF  JOHNSON    241 

was  the  question  and  answer  of  conversation, 
he  thought,  that  showed  what  a  man's  real 
abihties  were.  And  out  of  that  test  Thurlow 
came  so  triumphantly  that  Johnson  said  of 
him,  "  I  would  prepare  myself  for  no  man  in 
England  but  Lord  Thurlow.  When  I  am 
to  meet  with  him  I  should  Avish  to  know  a  day 
before."  He  paid  him  the  same  compliment 
more  than  once ;  and  the  man  to  whom  he 
paid  it  cannot  have  been  the  least  interesting 
element  in  that  interesting  circle.  A  very 
different  figure  was  the  infidel  and  demagogue 
Wilkes,  of  whom  Johnson  had  used  the  most 
violent  language  in  public  and  private,  but 
with  whom,  under  the  dexterous  management 
of  Boswell,  he  came  to  be  on  terms  of  friendly 
acquaintance.  The  story  of  how  Boswell 
brought  them  together,  of  which  Burke  said 
that  there  was  "  nothing  to  equal  it  in  the 
whole  history  of  the  Corps  Diplomatique,** 
is  one  of  the  very  best  things  in  the  Life. 
Of  course  they  never  became  friendly,  but 
they  met  occasionally  and  Johnson  sent 
Wilkes  a  presentation  copy  of  his  Lives. 
The  acquaintance  is  one  of  the  most  striking 
instances  of  the  real  tolerance  which  lay 
behind  Johnson's  outbursts  of  prejudice. 
He  and  Wilkes  had  nothing  in  common  but 
quick  brains,  witty  tongues,  social  gifts  and 
dislike  of  the  Scotch;  but  that  was  enough. 
Q 


242    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

Johnson  would  have  sympathized  with  the 
respectable  freeholder  of  Middlesex  who,  when 
canvassed  for  his  vote  by  Wilkes  replied, 
*'  Vote  for  you,  sir  !  I  would  rather  vote  for 
the  devil  !  "  But  he  would  have  sympathized 
even  more  with  the  candidate's  reply :  "  But 
— ^in  case  your  friend  does  not  stand  ?  " 

No  one  ^\ill  say  that  a  set  of  acquaintances 
which  stretched  from  Burke  at  one  end  to 
Wilkes  at  the  other  did  not  provide  strong 
and  varied  political  meat  for  the  society  to 
which  they  belonged.  It  is  ^  just  the  same 
when  we  look  beyond  politics.  If  all  John- 
son's acquaintances  could  have  been  gathered 
into  one  room,  the  unlikeliest  people  would 
have  found  themselves  together.  The  saintly 
John  Wesley,  for  instance,  and  the  very  far 
from  saintly  Topham  Beauclerk,  make  a 
curious  pair.  Yet  both  of  them  loved  and 
honoured  Johnson  all  their  lives  and  both 
were  always  loved,  at  any  rate,  by  him ;  and 
the  one  who  got  the  less  honour  got  the  more 
love.  No  one  could  take  such  liberties  ■v\ath 
Johnson  as  this  man  who  had  been  through 
the  Divorce  Court  and  was  behaving  badly 
to  the  wife  whom  he  had  stolen.  Johnson 
did  not  spare  Beauclerk  the  rebukes  he 
deserved  :  but  he  could  not  resist  the  intel- 
lectual gifts  and  social  charm  of  that  true 
descendant  of  Charles  II.     When  Beauclerk 


THE  FRIENDS   OF   JOHNSON     243 

lay  dying  Johnson  said,  "  I  would  walk  to 
the  extent  of  the  diameter  of  the  earth  to 
save  Beauclerk  " ;  and  when  he  was  dead, 
Johnson  wrote  to  Boswell,  "  Poor  dear  Beau- 
clerk — necy  ut  soles,  dabis  jocay  That  he 
could  win  the  warm  affection  of  such  a  man 
as  Beauclerk  is  one  more  proof  of  the  breadth 
of  his  sympathies.  The  most  surprising  people 
felt  his  fascination.  Wraxall  says  that  he 
had  seen  the  beautiful  Duchess  of  Devon- 
shire, "  then  in  the  first  bloom  of  youth, 
hanging  on  the  sentences  that  fell  from  John- 
son's lips,  and  contending  for  the  nearest 
place  to  his  chair  " ;  and  it  is  recorded  of 
Kitty  Clive  the  actress,  whom  he  used  to  go 
and  see  in  the  green-room,  that  she  said  of 
him,  "  I  love  to  sit  by  Dr.  Johnson  :  he 
always  entertains  me." 

But  of  course  neither  Duchesses,  nor 
actresses,  nor  even  gay  young  men  of  fashion 
fresh  from  the  Divorce  Court,  were  more 
than  occasional  or  single  splendours  in  the 
Johnsonian  heaven  :  its  fixed  stars  of  ordinary 
nights  were  less  dazzling  persons.  Many  were 
scholars,  of  course,  as  befitted  a  man  of  books. 
The  greatest,  but  one  of  the  least  frequent  or 
intimate,  was  Gibbon^  He  was  a  member  of 
"TheXJubJLand  a  friend  of  Re3/nolds  and 
Fox :  but  his  feeling  for  Johnson  was.  £i,ppar- 

ently  one  of  fear  unmingled  with  love.   Though 
Q  2  7 


244    DR.   JOHNSON  AND  HIS   CIRCLE 

hcunet  them  both  fairly  of ten^  he  never  men- 
tions Boswell,  and  Johnson  only  once  ortwice. 
The  historian  j^o  fmilfl_nnt  t^lk  was  not 
-''  hkely  to  appreciate  tlie  .  gcfiat  talker  who 
\  cared  jQothing  for  history :  so  one  is  not 
<^^  surprised^  to  find  JohnsorT^^missed  in  the 
j famous__MmozV5  as  merely  the  "oracle" 
/  ojE^^ReynoJi^t  A  inuch^greater-iriend  was 
another  member  of  "  The  Club,"  Percy,  of  the 
Reliques  of  Poetry,  afterwards^jL  BishaE>_^  with 
whom  he  often  quarrelled  but  was  always 
reconciled.  Boswell  managed  the  most  im- 
portant of  their  reconciliations  by  obtaining 
a  letter  from  Johnson  testifying  to  Percy's 
merit  which  so  pleased  Percy  that  he  said, 
"  I  would  rather  have  this  than  degrees  from 
all  the  Universities  in  Europe."  The  whole 
story  is  a  curious  proof  of  the  respect  in  which 
Johnson  was  held  :  for  Percy's  grievance  was 
that  Johnson  had  snubbed  him  in  the  presence 
of  a  distinguished  member  of  his  own  family, 
*'  to  whom  he  hoped  to  have  appeased  more 
respectable  by  showing  how  intimate  he  was 
with  Dr.  Johnson."  Johnson  laughed  at  Percy's 
ballads  and  would  have  been  the  last  person  to 
guess  the  immense  influence  the  publication 
of  the  Reliques  was  to  have  on  the  development 
of  English  literature  in  the  next  century  :  but 
he  knew  his  value,  and  said  he  never  met  him 
without  learning  something  from  him. 


THE   FRIENDS   OF   JOHNSON    245 

Among  other  men  of  interest  with  whom 
he  may  be  said  to  have  been  intimate  at  one 
time  or  another  in  his  Hfe  may  be  mentioned 
his  old  pupil  David  Garrick,  the  most  famous 
and  perhaps  the  greatest  of  English  actors,' 
whom  he  loved  and  abused  and  would  allow 
no  one  else  to  abuse :  Richardson,  the  author 
of  Clarissa,  who  once  came  to  his  rescue  when 
he  was  arrested  for  debt,  and  of  whose  powers 
he  had  such  a  high  opinion  that  he  declared 
that  there  was  "  more  knowledge  of  the  heart 
in  one  letter  of  Richardson's  than  in  aD  Tom 
Jones  " ;  the  two  Wartons,  Joseph,  the  Head- 
master of  Winchester  and  editor  of  Pope,  and 
Thomas  the  author  of  the  history  of  English 
Poetry  and  himself  Poet  Laureate  ;  both  good 
scholars  and  critics  who  partly  anticipated  the 
poetic  tastes  of  the  nineteenth  century  :  Paoli, 
the  hero  of  Boswell  and  the  Corsicans,  vath. 
whom  Johnson  loved  to  dine  :  Douglas,  Bishop 
of  Salisbury,  who  wrote  against  Hume  and 
edited  Clarendon ;  Savage,  the  poet  of  mysteri- 
ous birth  whose  homeless  life  he  sometimes 
shared  and  finally  recorded  :  (ieorge  Psal- 
manazar,  the  converted  impostor,  an  even 
more  mysterious  person,  whom  Johnson 
reverenced  and  said  he  "  sought  after  "  more 
than  any  man  :  booksellers  like  Cave  and 
Da  vies  and  the  brothers  Dilly :  scholarly 
lawyers   like    Sir  William    Scott,  afterwards 


246    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

Lord  Stowell,  whom  he  made  executor  to  his 
will,  and  Sir  Robert  Chambers  whom  he 
reproved  for  tossing  snails  over  a  wall  into  his 
neighbour's  garden  till  he  heard  the  neighbour 
was  a  Dissenter,  on  which  he  said,  "  Oh,  if 
so,  toss  away,  Chambers,  toss  away";  and 
physicians  like  Heberden,  beloved  of  Cowper, 
whom  Johnson  called  ultimus  Romanorum, 
and  Laurence,  President  of  the  College  of 
Physicians,  to  whom  he  addressed  a  Latin 
Ode.  All  these  were  men  of  interest  either 
in  themselves  or  in  their  experience  of  life; 
all  brought  something  worth  having  to  the 
society  in  which  they  lived;  and  with  all  of 
them  Johnson  may  be  said  to  have  been  on 
intimate  terms.  Nor  did  he  confine  his  friend- 
ship to  men.  He  had  a  higher  opinion  of  the 
intellectual  capacities  of  women  than  most 
men  of  his  time,  and  many  of  the  most 
remarkable  women  of  the  time  enjoyed 
his  intimacy.  Among  them  may  be  men- 
tioned Elizabeth  Carter,  the  translator  of 
Epictetus,  whom  he  thought  the  best  Greek 
scholar  he  had  known,  and  praised  for  being 
also  a  good  maker  of  puddings ;  Fanny 
Burney,  of  whose  novels  he  was  an  enthusiastic 
admirer;  Mrs.  Montagu,  Mrs.  Macaulay,  and 
Hannah  More,  the  chief  learned  ladies  of  the 
day,  all  thi-ee  women  of  real  ability ;  and  his 
own  brilliant  and  witty  Mi's.  Thi-ale,  who  with- 


THE   FRIENDS   OF   JOHNSON    247 

out  being  a  professed  "  blue  stocking  "  has  for 
Jolmson's  sake  and  her  own  quite  eclipsed 
the  "  blue  stockings "  in  the  interest  of 
posterity.  Altogether  it  is  an  astonishing 
list.  Johnson  never  thought  of  himself  as  a 
man  to  be  envied ;  but  if  man  is  a  social  being, 
and  no  man  was  so  more  than.  Johnson,  there 
can  be  few  things  more  enviable,  in  possession 
or  in  retrospect,  than  the  society,  the  friend- 
ship, or,  as  it  often  was,  the  love,  of  such  men 
and  women  as  these. 

If  we  go  further  and  extend  the  inquiry  to 
those  who  can  scarcely  be  called  intimate 
friends,  but  with  whom  he  was  brought  into 
more  or  less  frequent  social  contact,  the  list 
becomes,  of  course,  too  long  to  give.  But  it  may 
be  worth  while  to  mention  that  it  would  again 
include  a  very  large  number  of  men  who  had 
something  in  them  above  the  ordinary.  For 
instance,  so  great  a  name  as  that  of  Hogarth 
would  be  found  in  it,  making  with  Allan  Ram- 
say whom  he  also  knew  well  and  Reynolds  who 
was  perhaps  the  most  intimate  of  all  his  friends, 
a  remarkable  trio  to  gather  round  a  man 
who  cared  nothing  for  painting.  He  managed 
without  that  to  impress  them  so  much  that 
Reynolds  gave  the  credit  of  whatever  was 
best  in  his  Discourses  to  the  "  education  "  he 
had  had  under  Johnson  :  and  Hogarth  de- 
clared that  his  conversation  was  to  the  talk 


248    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

of  other  men  "  like  Titian's  painting  compared 
to  Hudson's."  This  outer  circle  includes  also 
distinguished  architects  like  Sir  William 
Chambers  who  built  Somerset  House,  and 
Gwynn  who  built  Magdalen  Bridge  at  Oxford 
and  the  English  bridge  at  Shrewsbury :  bishops 
like  Barnard  of  Killaloe,  and  Shipley  the  liberal 
and  reforming  bishop  of  St.  Asaph  :  poets  like 
Collins  and  Young:  historians  and  divines 
like  Robertson  and  Hugh  Blair  :  philosophers 
and  men  of  science  like  Adam  Smith  and  Sir 
Joseph  Banks  :  with  a  certain  number  of 
intelligent  peers  like  Lord  Orrery  the  friend 
of  Swift,  Lord  Marchmont  the  friend  of  Pope, 
and  Lord  Ehbank  whom  Smollett  praised  for 
his  "  universal  intelligence  "  and  who  said, 
when  he  was  already  seventy,  that  he  would 
go  five  hundred  miles  to  enjoy  a  day  in  John- 
son's company ;  besides  public  men  like  Lord 
Charlemont  the  Irish  statesman  and  traveller 
who  once  went  to  visit  Montesquieu,  and  Lord 
Macartney  who  had  gone  as  ambassador  to 
Russia  and  was  soon  to  go  in  the  same  position 
to  Pekin. 

It  is  unnecessary  to  extend  the  list.  All 
these  men  knew  Johnson  to  a  greater  or  less 
extent,  and  added  to  the  interest  of  his  life, 
as  they  add  to  the  interest  of  Boswell's  record 
of  it.  Many  or  most  of  them  are  known  to 
have  recognized  the   greatness  of   Johnson. 


THE  FRIENDS   OF  JOHNSON  .  249 

The  words  of  some^  have  been  quoted  and 
others  might  easily  be  added.  Johnson  often 
appears  great  in  the  books  he  wrote,  and  often 
too  in  the  books  which  others  have  written 
about  him  :  but  it  seems  certain  that  unhke 
most  authors  he  was  far  greater  in  bodily 
presence  than  he  can  be  in  his  own  or  any  one 
else's  books.  Even  Boswell's  magic  pen 
cannot  .quite  equal  the  living  voice.  To  the 
overpowering  impression  made  by  that  voice 
upon  those  who  heard  it,  sometimes  of  almost 
bodily  fear,  oftener  of  a  delight  that  could 
not  have  enough,  always  of  amazed  astonish- 
ment, the  testimonies  are  not  only  innumer- 
able, but  so  strongly  worded  and  so  evidently 
sincere  as  to  suggest  the  conclusion  that  the 
fortunate  listeners  are  attempting  to  relate  an 
experience  unique  in  the  world's  history.  Even 
those  who  had  suffered  from  his  rudeness 
like  Wraxall,  the  author  of  the  well-known 
'Memoirs,  give  the  impression  of  being  unable 
to  find  words  strong  enough  to  describe  the 
power  of  his  presence,  so  that  they  use  expres- 
sions like  the  "  compass  of  his  gigantic  facul- 
ties "  and  "  the  sublime  attainments  of  his 
mind  "  in  speaking  of  the  gap  felt  by  the 
company  when  he  left  a  room.  The  latter 
expression  at  any  rate  hardly  seems  to  us 
exactly  to  fit  Johnson ;  but  no  doubt  Wraxall 
uses  the  word  "  sublime  -'  because  he  wants 


250    DR.   JOHNSON  AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

to  imply  that  there  was  something  in  John- 
son's talk  utterly  out  of  the  reach  of  ordinary 
men  of  ability.  In  fact  it  does  seem  probable 
that  no  recorded  man  has  ever  talked  with 
Johnson's  amazing  freedom  and  power.  Such 
an  assertion  cannot  be  proved,  of  course ;  but 
it  would  be  difficult  to  exaggerate  the  weight 
of  the  evidence  pointing  in  that  direction. 
We  have  seen  the  kind  of  society  in  which  he 
lived.  In  that  society,  rich  in  so  many  kinds 
of  distinction,  he  was  always  accorded,  as 
his  right,  a  kind  of  informal  but  quite  undis- 
puted precedence.  And  it  seems  to  have 
been  the  same  among  strangers  as  soon  as  he 
had  opened  his  mouth.  Whenever  and  where- 
ever  tongues  were  moving  his  primacy  was 
immediate  and  unquestioned.  The  actual 
ears  that  could  hear  him  were  necessarily 
few;  no  man's  acquaintances  can  be  more 
than  an  insignificant  fraction  of  the  public. 
But  in  his  case  they  were  sufficiently  numer- 
ous, distinguished  and  enthusiastic  to  send 
the  fame  of  his  talk  all  over  the  country.  Is  he 
the  only  man  whose  "  Bon  Mots,"  as  they  were 
called,  have  been  published  in  his  lifetime  ? 
"  A  mighty  impudent  thing,"  as  he  said  of  it, 
but  also  an  irrefragable  proof  of  his  celebrity. 
And  on  the  whole  his  popularity,  then  and 
since,  has  equalled  his  fame  Much  is  said  of 
his  mdeness  and  violence,  but  the  fact  remains 


THE  FRIENDS  OF  JOHNSON    251 

that  in  all  his  life  it  does  not  appear  to  have 
cost  him  a  single  friend  except  the  elder 
Sheridan.  Those  who  knew  him  best  bear  the 
strongest  testimony  to  the  fundamental  good- 
ness of  his  heart.  Reynolds  said  that  he  was 
always  the  first  to  seek  a  reconciliation, 
Goldsmith  declared  that  he  had  nothing  of 
the  bear  but  his  skin,  and  Boswell  records 
many  instances  of  his  placability  after  a 
quarrel.  The  love  his  friends  felt  for  him  is 
written  large  all  over  Boswell's  pages.  And 
of  that  feeling  the  public  outside  came  more 
and  more  to  share  as  much  as  strangers  could. 
Even  in  his  lifetime  he  began  to  receive  that 
popular  canonization  which  has  been  develop- 
ing ever  since.  Perhaps  the  most  curious  of 
all  the  proofs  of  this  is  the  fact  mentioned  by 
Boswell  in  a  note,  "  that  there  were  copper 
pieces  struck  at  Birmingham  with  his  head 
impressed  on  them,  which  pass  current  as 
halfpence  there,  and  in  the  neighbouring  parts 
of  the  country."  Has  that  ever  happened 
to  any  other  English  writer  ?  Well  may 
Boswell  cite  it  in  evidence  of  Johnson's 
extraordinary  popularity.  It  is  that  and  it 
is  more.  There  is  in  it  not  merely  a  tribute 
of  affection  to  the  living  and  speaking  man, 
there  is  also  an  anticipation  of  the  most 
remarkable  thing  about  his  subsequent  fame. 
That  hap  had  all  along,  as  we  saw  at  first,  a 


252    DR.   JOHNSON   AND   HIS   CIRCLE 

popular  "element  in  it.  It  has  never  been, 
like  that  of  most  scholars  and  critics,  an  ex- 
clusively literary  thing,  confined  solely  to 
people  of  literary  instincts.  Rather  it  has 
been,  more  and  more,  what  the  newspapers 
and  the  Johnsoniana  and  these  coins  or  medals 
already  suggested,  something  altogether  wider. 
Samuel  Johnson  was  in  his  lifetime  a  well- 
known  figure  in  the  streets,  a  popular  name  in 
the  press.  He  is  now  a  national  institution, 
with  the  merits,  the  defects,  and  the  popularity 
which  belong  to  national  institutions.  His 
popularity  is  certainly  not  diminished  by  the 
fact  that  he  was  the  complacent  victim  of 
many  of  our  insular  prejudices  and  exhibited 
a  good  deal  of  the  national  tendency  to  a  crude 
and  self-confident  Philistinism.  These  things 
come  so  humanly  from  him  that  his  wisest 
admirers  have  scarcely  the  heart  to  complain 
or  disapprove.  They  laugh  at  him,  and  with 
him,  and  love  him  still.  But  they  could  not 
love  him  as  they  do  if  he  embodied  only  the 
weaknesses  of  his  race.  The  position  he  holds 
in  their  affection,  and  the  affection  of  the  whole 
nation,  is  due  to  other  and  greater  qualities. 
It  is  these  that  have  given  him  his  rare  and 
indeed  unique  distinction  as  the  accepted  and 
traditional  spokesman  of  the  integrity,  the 
humour,  and  the  obstinate  common  sense,  of 
the  English  people. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The  finest  Library  Edition  of  the  complete  works  of  Johnson 
is  that  published  at  Oxford  in  nine  ■volumes  in  1825.  Another 
good  one,  the  volumes  of  which  are  less  heavy,  is  that  of  1823 
in  twelve  volumes,  edited  by  Alexander  Chalmers. 

Among  the  very  numerous  editions  of  particular  works  the 
following  may  be  mentioned — 

The  Six  Chief  Lives  from  Johnson's  "Lives  of  the  Poets"  ;  with 

McLcaulay's  ^^  Life  of  Johnson."    Edited,  with  a  Preface  by 

Matthew  Arnold.     1878. 
nistory  of  Rasselas,  Prince  of  Abyssinia.     Edited,  with  Intro- 
duction and  Notes  by  George  Birkbeck  Hill.     1887. 
Lives  of  the  English   Poets.     By  Samuel  Johnson,    LL.D. 

Edited  by  George  Birkbeck  Hill,    D.C.L.     In  three 

volumes.     1905. 
Johnson  on  Shakespeare.     Essays  and  Notes  selected  and  set 

forth  with  an  Introduction.    By  Walter  Raleigh.    1908. 
The  Letters  of  Samuel  Johnson,  LL.D.     Collected  and  edited 

by  George  Birkbeck  Hill.     In  two  volumes.     1892. 
Only  a  few  of  the  letters  are  given  in  the  editions  of 

the  complete  works.     In  this  edition  the  letters  already 

given  by  Boswell  in  his  Life  are  not  reprinted. 
Select  Essays  of  Dr.  Johnson.     Edited  by  George  Birkbeck 

Hill.     In  two  volumes.     1889.     (Temple  Library.) 
These   Essays   are  chiefly  from  The  Rambler  and  The 

Idler. 
Wit  and  Wisdom,  of  Samuel  Johnson.     Selected  and  arranged 

by  George  Birkbeck  Hill.     1888. 

This  consists  of  sayings  on  various  subjects   arranged 

alphabetically,  with  an  interesting  introduction. 

The  main  authority  for  the  life  of  Johnson  is,  of  course, 

Boswell.     His  account  is  given  in  two  books,  the  Journal  of  a 

Tour  to  the  Hebrides  with  Samuel  Johnson,  LL.D.,  published 

in  1785,  and  the  Life  which  followed  in  two  volumes  in  1791. 

253 


254  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The  best  edition  of  the  Life  is  that  edited  by  Dr.  Birkbeck  Hill 
in  six  volumes,  one  of  which  is  given  to  the  Tour  to  the  Hebrides, 
published  in  1887.  No  one  who  has  worked  on  Johnson  since 
that  year  can  overstate  his  debt  to  this  book  or  his  gratitude 
to  its  author.  The  prettiest  and  pleasantest  of  all  editions  ot 
Boswell  is  that  known  as  Wright's  Croker.  It  is  a  revision 
by  J.  Wright  of  the  edition  by  J.  W.  Croker,  and  includes  a 
collection  of  Johnsoniana.  It  consists  of  ten  handy  volumes, 
illustrated  by  many  steel  engi'aviugs,  and  first  ajipeared  in 
1831. 

The  most  important  of  the  many  accounts  of  Johnson  left  by 
other  contemporaries  are  those  given  by  Mrs.  Thrale,  Fanny 
Burney  and  his  executor,  Sir  John  Hawkins.  Mrs.  Thrale's  is 
contained  in  a  volume  entitled  Anecdotes  of  the  late  Samuel 
Johnson,  LL.D.,  during  the  last  Tuenty  Years  of  his  Life.  By 
Hester  Lynch  Piozzi.  It  was  first  published  in  1786.  Fanny 
Burney's  picture  of  him  is  to  be  found  in  her  Diary  and  Letters, 
of  which  the  best  edition  is  that  by  Austin  Dobson,  1904.  Sir* 
John  Hawkins  prefixed  a  Life  of  Johnson  to  the  edition  of  his 
works  which  he  brought  out  in  1787.  Dr.  Birkbeck  Hill  has 
reprinted  a  large  collection  of  biographical  matter  drawn  from  a 
variety  of  sources  in  his  two  volumes  of  Johnsonian  Miscellanies, 
1897. 

The  critical  studies  of  Johnson  are  of  course  inmunerablo. 
Among  the  best  are  Carlyle's,  printed  in  his  Works  among 
the  Miscellaneous  Essays,  Sir  Leslie  Stephen's  volume  in  the 
"English  Men  of  Letters"  series,  and  Sir  Walter  Ealeigh's  ^ia; 
Essays  on  Johnson.  The  Life  written  by  Macaulay  for  the 
Encyclopcedia  Britannica  and  reprinted  by  Matthew  Arnold  in 
his  edition  of  the  Six  Chief  Lives  must  not  be  confused  with 
the  essay  reprinted  in  the  collected  Essays. 

Dr.  Birkbeck  Hill  published  in  1879  an  edition  of  BosweU's 
correspondence  with  the  Hon.  A.  Erskme,  and  of  his  Journal 
of  a  Tour  to  Corsica,  reprinted  from  the  original  editions. 
BosweU's  Letters  to  his  and  Gray's  friend,  the  Rev.  J.  W. 
Temple,  were  first  published  in  1857. 


INDEX 

^Principally  of  Persons  l-noicn  to  Dr.  Johnson,  or  mentioned  in  his 
Writings  or  Conversation) 


Adams,  Dr.,  91, 166 

Addisou,  J.,  140,  192,  194,  222,  224, 

229 
ArgyU,  Duke  of,  73,  83,  84,  121, 124 
Auchinleck,  Lord,  71,  72,  142 

Bankes,  Sir  J.,  108,  218,  246 
Barclay,  Mr.,  105 
Baretti,  J.,  89,  113,  218 
Barnard,  Bishop,  233,  248 
Beauclerk,   Topham,   55,  108,  115, 

242,  243 
Berkeley,  Bishop,  203,  204 
Binning,  Lord,  234 
Blair,  H.,  248 
Bolingbroke,  Lord,  166 
Boswell,  J.,  8  and  passim 
BosweU,  Mrs.,  49 
Bryant,  J.,  90 
Burke,  E.,  54,  56,  70,  83,  108,  136, 

144-5,  173,  232,  233,  234,  236,  237, 

239,  240,  241,  242 
Bumey,  Fanny,  105,  127,  130, 131, 

136,  143,  184,  246 
Bute,  Lord,  103 
Butler,  Bishop,  120,  138,  248 

Carmichael,  Miss,  167,  169 

Carter,  Elizabeth,  246 

Cave,  E.,  245 

Chambers,  Sir  R.,  246 

Chambers,  Sir  W.,  248 

Charlemont,  Lord,  248 

Charles  II,  138 

Chatham,  Earl  of,  81,  95 

Chesterfield,  Earl  of,  86,  88,  124 

Clarissa  Harlowe,  196-7 

Clive,  Kitty,  243 

"Club,  The,"  37,  47,  54,  67,  83 

Collins,  W.,  177,  220,  224,  227,  248 

Colman,  G.,  108,  233 

Corbet,  lilr.,  91 

Cowley,  A.,  23,  65,  186,  189,  207 

Covn>er,  W.,  108,  246 

Croker,  38 

Davies,  Mr.,  16,  73,  74,  115,  245 
Davles,  Mrs.,  74 
Dempster,  G.,  240 
Derrick,  8.,  73 
Devonshire,  Duchess  of,  243 
Devonshire,  Duke  of,  18 
Dictionary,  The,  8,  15,  30,  98,  100-2, 

124,  147,  187,  202,  207-111 
Dilly,  C,  164,245 
Dodsley,  E.,  98 
Douglas,  Bishop,  245 


Dryden,  J.,  177,  184,  186,  189,  192, 
201,  205,  214,  220,  221,  222,  226 

Edwards,  O.,  44 
Elegy,  Gray's,  225 
Blibank,  Lord,  84,  248 
Errol,  Lord,  84 

Falkland  Islands,  107 

False  Alann,  The,  107,  188 

Fielding,  H.,  109 

Fitzherbert,  W.,  240 

Foote,  S.,  115-6 

Ford,  Sarah,  87 

Fox,  C.  J.,  83, 145, 161, 233,  236,  237, 

238,  243 
Frank,  129 
Franklin,  B.,  81 
Frederick  the  Great,  76 

Garrick,  D.,  83,  94,  98, 115, 144, 147, 

149,  245 
Gentleman,  Mr.,  73 
Gentleman's  Magazine,  92,  95 
George  III,  17,  86,  103,  106,  236,  238 
Gibbon,  E.,  54,  68,  83, 138, 184, 201, 

233,  242,  243 
Gifford,  W.,  90 
Goldsmith,  O.,  54,  83, 107, 128, 155, 

156,  181,  184-5,  233,  234,  236,  243, 

250   251 
Gray,'T.,  16,  17,66-7,  80,  151,  177, 

220,  224,  225,  227,  228,  236 
Gwynn,  J.,  248 

Hallam,  83 
Hamilton,  W.  G.,  239 
Hawkins,  Sir  J.,  128,  131,  232 
Heberden,  Dr.,  108,  246 
Hervey,  H.,  94 
Hodge,  129 
Hogarth,  W.,  247 
Holland,  Lord,  80 
Hume,  D.,  81,  138,  236 

Idler,  The,  15,  103,  185,  193-5 
Irene,  94,  95,  98 

Johnson,  M.,  87,  91 

Johnson,    Mrs.    (mother),   87,   92, 

101,  128 
Johnson,  Mrs.  (wife),  92-6,  99-100 
Journey  to  the  Western  Islands,  107, 

147,  150,  193 

King  Lear,  177 

Langton,  B.,  89,  113,  115,  232 
Laurence,  Dr.,  246 


255 


256 


INDEX 


Law,  W.,  120, 141 
Letter  to  Lord  Chesterfield,  86,  88 
Levett,  R.,  108,  183 
Life  of  Richard  Savaae,  96 
Lives  of  the  Poets,  14,  36,  107,  177, 
185,  188,  193,  202,  207,  219  et  seq. 
London,  95,  96 
Lonsdale,  Lord,  86 
Loudoun,  Lord,  84 
Lucan,  Lord,  l04-5 
Lycidas,  203-4,  224,  226 

M'Aulay,  Rev.  J.  50 
Macartney,  Lord,  248 
Macaulay,  Mrs.,  20,  246 
Macbeth,  97  177 
Maclean,  Sir  A.,  112 
Macpherson,  J.,  117,  166 
Mallet,  D.,  192 
Marchmont,  Lord,  248 
Miltcm,  J.,  9,  152, 152,  177, 190,  208, 

204,  206,  220,  221,  222,  224,  225, 

228 
Monhoddo.  Lord.  84, 149 
Montagu,  Mrs.,  246 
Montpomerie,  Margaret,  82 
Move,  Hannah,  240 
Murphy,  A.,  109 

Newton,  Bishop,  166-7 
Northumberland,  Duke  of,  121 

Orlando  Furioso,  89 
Orrery,  Lord,  222,  248 
Ossian,  117,  106 

Paoli,  71,  72,  77,  79,  80,  82,  109, 
245 

Paradise  Lost,  204,  228 

Parliamentary  Debates,  95 

PatHot,  The,  107 

Percy,  Bishop,  244,  249 

Pitt,  W.,  51 

Pope,  A.,  11,  16,  17,  18,  25,  34-5,  59, 
65,  96,  102, 177,  180,  181, 182,  220, 
221,  222,  225,  220,  229,  248 

Porter,  Mrs.    See  Mrs.  Johnson 

Pot,  Mr.,  98 

Prayers  and  Meditations,  194 

Prologues,  98,  107 

Psalmanazar,  G.,  245 

Queen  Anne,  87 

Rambler,  The,  15,  224,  99-100,  127, 
140,  179,  185,  186,  193  et  seq.,  197, 
199,  200 

Bamsay,  A„  234,  247 


Rasselas,  15,  28,  103,  185,  186,  187, 

193,  194,  196-7,  201-3 
ReHques  of  Poetry,  Percy,  249 
Reynolds,  Sir  J.,  44-5,  54,  70,  88, 

85,  97,  109,  111,  122,  160,161,  188, 

189,  233,  234,  236,  238,  243,  247, 

250,  251 
Richardson,  S.,  196-7,  245 
Robertson,  W.,  145,  146,  150,  234, 

248 
Rousseau,  J.  J.,  77,  80,  174 

Samson  Agonistes,  204,  228 

Savage,  R.,  96,  245 

Scott,  Sir  W.,  245 

Settle,  E.,  189 

Shaktsjxare,  7,  9,  14,  15,  31-8,  97, 

98.  102,  107,  176,   177,  103,  202, 

207,  211  etseq.,  220 
Shelbume,  Lord,  124,  236-7 
Sheridan,  R.  B.,  197,  233,  250 
Sheridan,  T.,  251 
Shipley,  Bishop,  246,  248 
Siddons,  Mrs.,  163-4 
Smith,  Adam,  S3,  150,  248 
SmoUett,  T.,  103,  248 
Sterne,  L.,  236 
StoweU,  Lord,  246 
Swift,  12,  123,  182,  217,  222,  225 

Tate,  N..  177 

Taxation  no  Tyranny,  66,  107,  126 

Taylor,  Rev.  J.,  107,  108 

Temple,  Rev.  W.,  56,  81 

Thomson,  J.,  220 

Thrale,  Mr.,  102,  104,  106,  107,  108, 
131,  186-7 

Thrale,  Mrs.,  19,  46,  102,  104,  105, 
106,  107,  112,  113,  121,122-3,  125, 
127,  131,  133,  134,  140,  246-7 

Thurlow,  Lord,  47-8,  240-1 

Vanity  of  Human  Wishes,  99,  182, 

183 
Voltaire,  76,  77,  90, 188, 173, 174 

WaUer,E.,  205 
Warbiirton,  Bishop,  25,  97 
Warren,  Mr.,  92 
Warton,  J.,  233,  245 
Warton,  T.,  245 
Wesley,  J.,  47,  56,  138,  159,  242 
Wilkes,  J.,  148,  164,  188,  241-2 
Williams,  Mrs.,  108 
Windham,  W.,  108,  239 
Wraxall,  Sir  N.,  243,  248-9 

Young,  E.,  248 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 

Los  Angeles 

This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


43     9/77 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


PR 

353: 

B15 


AA    000  380  122    2 


STRATFORD  &  GREEN 


